Coal Pollution in China Found to Lower Life Expectancy

Reader Contribution by Margaret Badore
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Reposted with permission from TreeHugger.

One of the great challenges of studying the public health problems caused by pollution is the lack of an appropriate control group. In most places where pollution has occurred, there’s no corresponding population that is unexposed, and it would be unethical to intentionally expose one group of people to pollution.

A policy to provide free coal for heating north of China’s Huai river but not in the southern part of the country created such a control group, allowing researchers to study the health effects of coal pollution. Although the policy has since been abandoned, coal-burning heating systems are still present and China consumes the most coal of any nation.

Published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a new report analyzes public health data from 1981 to 2000. The authors found life expectancy to be about 5.5 years shorter in the North, where coal pollution is much more concentrated.

The authors controlled for possible confounding factors like access to care, and analyzed causes of death. The Washington Post reports:

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