Public health management: life expectancy and air pollution

Air pollution shortens life expectancy and health expectancy for older adults: the case of China.

BACKGROUND Outdoor air pollution is one of the most worrying environmental threats China faces today. Comprehensive and quantitative analyses of the health consequences of air pollution in China are lacking. This study reports age- and sex-specific life expectancy and health expectancies (HEs) corresponding to different levels of air pollution based on associations between air pollution and ind...

Air pollution and life expectancy in China and beyond.

In PNAS, Chen et al. (1) present findings that implicate long-term exposure to air pollution as contributing to enormous loss of life expectancy (LE) in China. These results are based on a clever quasiexperimental, regression discontinuity design exploiting a Chinese policy that provided free coal for heating in cities north of the Huai River, but not in the south. A spatial discontinuity for p...

Air pollution and life expectancy: is there a relation?

The great smog disasters of the past have made clear that air pollution can kill people in a matter of days: extremely high concentrations of air pollution building up under conditions of low wind speed and stable atmospheric conditions have been associated with excess deaths in the Meuse Valley, Belgium (1930); Donora, PA, United States (1948); and London, United Kingdom (1952). In the develop...

Brunekreef relation ? Air pollution and life expectancy : is there a

Air pollution, public health, and inflation

Since the passage of the environmental legislation in the early 1970's, critics have attacked these laws as being unnecessary and for contributing significantly to the problem of inflation in the United States. This paper is an attempt to put the inflationary costs of air pollution into perspective by considering them in light of the cost, especially to public health, of not proceeding with pol...