Pediatric asthma linked to traffic
Posted on March 3, 2008
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Children who live close to traffic-clogged roads are more likely to have asthma than children who live farther from heavily traveled streets, according to a new state report that focuses on six Merrimack Valley communities.
The report also states that the prevalence of asthma in children in Andover, Dracut, Haverhill, Lawrence, Methuen, and North Andover combined was 9.4 percent, compared with 7.7 percent in 15 control communities across the state.
Local officials said the study results could spur the Merrimack Valley communities and the state to do more to curtail asthma - a scourge affecting about 17.3 million Americans, including 5 million children nationwide, the report states. “I’ll be more cognizant as we consider new development,” Thomas Schiavone, Lawrence’s economic development director, said last week. “We really need to do anything we can to alleviate childhood asthma.”
The research, conducted from 1998 to 2001, had two parts. One compared the number of asthma cases among 34,000 children ages 5 to 14 against the distance of their homes from a road, at five intervals from 25 meters to 200 meters away, and the road’s traffic volume, or average number of automobiles, trucks, and buses traveling on it daily.
At each distance, children with asthma were consistently found to live nearer to a greater volume of traffic than those without the disease. The study also found that the risk for asthma decreased the farther away a child lived from the road. Dracut did not figure in this part of the research.
“This finding stresses the importance of programs to reduce gaseous pollutants and particulates from vehicles,” the report by the state Bureau of Environmental Health says.
Final interpretation and release of the findings had to wait until this year because of state budget cuts in 2002, said Suzanne Condon, director of the state bureau and the report’s author.
The study did not evaluate how low the traffic volume would have to be, or how far away a child would have to live, to eliminate asthma risk.
In separate tests, researchers also compared asthma rates among 37,000 children in all six Merrimack Valley communities with the rates among an equal number of children in 15 communities across the state similar in socio-demographic characteristics.
The prevalence of childhood asthma ranged from 6.5 to 12.2 percent in the Merrimack Valley communities, with the highest percentage in Lawrence, the report states.
Pediatric asthma ranged from 4.5 to 14.1 percent in the comparison communities of Chelsea, East Bridgewater, Easthampton, Grafton, Hingham, Holbrook, Leicester, Marshfield, Medfield, Melrose, Seekonk, Somerset, Somerville, Swansea, and Wakefield.
Reacting to the findings, which were released Feb. 19, North Andover Town Manager Mark Rees said only the state can regulate tailpipe emissions and highway construction.
Rees also said the inability to clamp down on traffic at the local level relates to ever-greater strains on municipal budgets that cry out for tax-producing commercial development.
“Under Proposition 2 1/2, the only way you can try to survive is to foster economic development,” Rees said. “Transportation infrastructure is critical” in those projects.
Condon said communities should try to “design development projects in a way that keeps children farthest away from higher-density traffic areas.”
Condon said her agency has been working with the state Highway Department and other agencies on so-called smart growth, to try to persuade private developers to use health data in planning. Smart growth developments encourage the use of public transportation and walking, instead of cars.
The state Department of Environmental Protection also awards grants to communities to help them retrofit municipal vehicles with devices to help reduce tailpipe emissions. Spokesman Joe Ferson said the agency aims to underwrite retrofitting all school buses in the state by 2010.
Rees said his town has received a $5,000 grant to reduce tailpipe emissions from a front-end loader. He said the device cuts down respiratory-health-damaging emissions of fine particulates by 25 percent, and carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons by 60 percent.
Milagro Grullón, Lawrence’s neighborhood planner, said the city is applying for similar grants.
Condon said communities can take other steps to protect children from harmful emissions.
For example, when planning school athletic facilities, developers should locate outdoor playing fields as far away from busy roads as possible, she said. Another suggestion is to allow children on an outdoor playground at times other than rush-hour.
Schools should also keep parents from stacking up outside schools in idling cars at drop-off or pickup time. She said state anti-idling law prohibits operation of a stationary motor vehicle for more than five minutes.
Many schools are built so that air-intake systems are too close to truck loading docks - a situation that should be avoided, she said.
It was after local activists expressed concern about air pollution that the research got started in 1998. They were worried about possible health effects from five municipal solid- and medical-waste incinerators operating within 2.5 miles of each other in the Merrimack Valley, along with a medical-waste plant in downtown Lawrence.
Researchers initially probed whether air pollution was contributing to a high rate of breast cancer. When no correlation was found, they turned their attention to respiratory diseases.
School nurses were asked to provide the number of children in kindergarten through eighth grade who had been diagnosed with asthma in all public and private schools in the research communities.
Researchers compared the children’s addresses with proximity to incinerators and major roads, correlated with weather patterns. Privacy and other laws prevented researchers from getting the addresses of all the children, and Dracut did not participate in this part of the study.
The report surprised some local officials, particularly since they had expected that the area’s incinerators would have proved to be the chief cause of the illness, and not traffic. Instead, the report said that incinerators in operation from 1999 to 2001, when most of the data were collected, “did not appear to be major contributors” to pediatric asthma. “It’s definitely a little surprising,” said Brian LaGrasse, Methuen’s health director.
Many local officials said they had not yet read the report, but want to follow up.
“We’ll be looking at it and any recommendations and any scientific data so that we can provide some support and education for the community in order to address this concern,” said Dracut’s public health nurse, Ronald Mote.
The report also indicates that factors beyond traffic might have contributed to the area’s high rate of pediatric asthma, including such indoor exposures as household mold and cigarette smoke.
LaGrasse said he would encourage the state to undertake more research on indoor-air pollution. Then, he said, official results could be compared with similar initiatives in other regions and states.
The state public health agency met with Lawrence officials on Feb. 19 to discuss the asthma findings. The results are set to be shared with the region’s public health and healthcare officials at a conference in April.
Connie Paige can be reached at cpaige@globe.com.
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