SierraScape December 2005 - January 2006
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by Ken Schechtman, PhD and Mario Castro, MD
In a recent statement, Vice President Dick Cheney opined that conservation may be a worthwhile "personal virtue," but that it is not of sufficient importance to warrant a major focus as national policy. While the folly of that assertion could be addressed from innumerable directions, we use the experience of the 1996 summer Olympic Games in Atlanta to illustrate one health consequence of limited attention to conservation as measured by our national indifference to fuel economy standards.
The restrictions on vehicular traffic that were mandated during the Atlanta Olympics provided a unique laboratory for evaluating the association between motor vehicle emissions, air pollution, and health. During the Olympics, Atlanta officials added 1000 buses to their normal fleet. They simultaneously closed the entire downtown area to private vehicular traffic. As reported in a 2001 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the effect of these changes on air pollution was dramatic.
The authors compared the four weeks immediately preceding and the four weeks immediately following the Olympics with the actual 17 day Olympic period. They found that there were substantial reductions in the average daily concentration of several key pollutants during the Olympic period. These decreases were 27.9% for ozone, 18.5% for carbon monoxide, 16.1% for small airborne particles defined as particulate matter with a diameter less than 10 micro meters, and 6.8% for nitrogen dioxide. In assessing these reductions, it is important to emphasize that they could not be explained by altered weather conditions because the data indicate that a variety of meteorological parameters were at most marginally different when the Olympic and non-Olympic periods were compared. Thus, the reasons for the reduced pollution levels were reduced private vehicular traffic and the increased availability of public transportation.
To evaluate the acute impact of these conditions on health, the authors focused on asthma among children age 1 to 16. The results were as follows. During the Olympic period as compared to the control period, there was a reduction of 41.6% in the number of asthma emergency care visits and hospitalizations as measured by the Medicaid claims file database. The corresponding reduction among HMO enrollees in Atlanta was 44.1%. Asthma-related visits to 2 large pediatric emergency departments in Atlanta decreased by 11.1% and there was a citywide reduction of 19.1% in asthma hospitalizations.
It might be hypothesized that the true cause of the above reductions in asthma-related health care events was unrelated to pollution levels but, instead, resulted from a generalized decrease in health care utilization caused by the disruptive influence of the Olympic Games themselves.
While this might be theoretically possible, the data clearly indicate that this was not the case. Indeed, the Olympic period was actually associated with a small increase in the daily number of non asthma-related acute care events. That increase was 3.1% when measured by the Medicaid database and 2.1% when quantified by pediatric emergency department visits.
In summary, the Atlanta Olympics provided a unique opportunity to study the health effects of reduced air pollution resulting from reduced motor vehicle use and the increased availability of public transportation. The result was that during the Olympic Games, reduced pollution from motor vehicles was associated with substantial reductions in the use of acute asthma-related urgent care facilities among children age 1 to 16. These reductions were observed among all of the asthma health care providers that were evaluated and were as large as 44%. They could not be explained by factors such as changed weather conditions or the effect of Olympic disruptions on the utilization of medical care in general.
We conclude: Conservation as it was practiced during the specialized period of the Atlanta Olympics was far more than a "personal virtue." Increases in the availability of public transportation and reduced pollution from private motor vehicles have the potential to benefit our children's health in profoundly important ways. There is every reason to expect that a national policy focused on reduced vehicular emissions would extend the Atlanta Olympic experience to the rest of the nation. It might also be anticipated that the benefits would accrue not only to asthma, but to other respiratory diseases and to a variety of cardiovascular ailments.