"Road hazard? Tufts researchers study health risks highways may pose in neighborhoods" by Bina Venkataraman, Globe Correspondent | April 12, 2009
Residents of Somerville's Nunnery Grounds neighborhood have long tolerated concrete vistas of Interstate 93 and Mystic Avenue, honking cars, and black grime on their windowsills. Now, they are increasingly worried about an invisible highway nuisance: the tiniest pieces of pollution emitted by passing traffic.
Community members in Somerville, as well as Boston's Chinatown, have joined with Tufts University researchers to determine whether microscopic "ultrafine particles" spewed by combustion engines are harming the health of people who live close to highways. In a study that is the first of its kind in the state and among the first in the nation, the scientists will measure these tiny pollutants in various locations and collect and map heart disease data from residents.
For decades, researchers have studied the dangers of coarse particles emitted by power plants and vehicles, which can aggravate asthma and other health problems and are regulated by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Ultrafine particles are less understood and not subject to direct government limits, even though many scientists believe they could be even more harmful.
"Since we see associations with asthma and cardiovascular disease with people living near highways, you have to ask what's causing that," said Doug Brugge, director of the Tufts Community Research Center and the scientist leading the study, which will begin this summer. "There is a lot of smoke suggesting that there is a fire."
Researchers suspect the health risk from ultrafine particles is greatest downwind and within 300 feet of busy highways. Farther away, the particles tend to dissipate or collide with other particles to become larger. The particles, each thousands of times smaller in diameter than a human hair, are easy to breathe in, and they readily spread throughout people's circulatory systems and enter their brains. On their surfaces, they can carry toxic chemicals and metals....
But this does not prove that highway pollution is the culprit.
No, it must be global warming, right?
People's genetic predisposition to disease, their habits, and their exposures to other environmental harms may be to blame....
Oh, I SEE!! It is YOUR OWN FAULT, citizen!!!
Why does Erin Brockovich creep into my mind at this point?
It could also point to the need to screen people who live and work near highways for heart and lung problems earlier and more regularly. For Dolores LaPiana, a resident of Nunnery Grounds who fought - and failed - to have the state plant a "wall of trees" lining the highway near her Somerville neighborhood, the new research is a way of getting government officials to respond.
But they want to put a fart mist meter up your ass!!! Un-fuckin'-real!!!!
"If there isn't a study," she said, "you're not going to get anyone to listen."
Not when you talk to government, industry, or MSM.
