- Exhaust fumes from vehicles may be to blame for up to
a sixth of cot deaths, says an international study.
-
- Soot from combustion is already linked with lung disease,
asthma and a rise in deaths from cardiovascular disease.
-
- Now scientists have linked the tiny pollutant particles
with 16 per cent of unexplained deaths among babies of normal birth weight.
-
- The particles, called PM10s because they are less than
10 micrometers in diameter, may also be responsible for 24 per cent of
all respiratory disease deaths of normal birth weight infants under the
age of one.
-
- The international team looked at death rates among 700,000
infants in the United States between 1995 and 1997 and compared them with
air pollution levels.
-
- The average all-cause mortality rate was 236.8 deaths
per 100,000 infants, with 14.7 per 100,000 attributed to PM10 pollution.
In the case of unexplained infant deaths, the figure was 11.7 per 100,000
- 16 per cent of the total.
-
- The research, led by Dr Reinhard Kaiser, previously at
the University of Basel in Switzerland, was published in the online journal
Environmental Health: A Global Access Science Source.
-
- The scientists wrote: "Evidence is building that
air pollution has an effect on infants and young children and a potential
impact during the foetal periodÖWe conclude that air pollution-related
infant mortality is a major public health problem."
-
- Cot death, or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (Sids), affects
about 300 babies a year in Britain. The Foundation for the Study of Infant
Deaths said it was likely that the link between air pollution and cot death
was real, and not the result of confounding factors.
-
- In the current issue of the journal Science, a team led
by Prof James Quinn of McMaster University, Ontario, reports evidence that
particulate air pollution can produce a genetic timebomb, after discovering
that mutations caused by the pollution in male mice can be passed to future
generations.
-
- In the journal, Prof Quinn, Dr Christopher Somers and
colleagues describe how they exposed two groups of laboratory mice to air
at an industrial site near a major motorway but passed the air for one
group through a filter designed to remove particulates. The researchers
also repeated the experiment with two groups in a rural area.
-
- After 10 weeks of exposure, the mice were bred and the
researchers looked for mutations in marker genetic sequences.
-
- The team found that offspring of the mice that had breathed
the polluted, unfiltered air inherited mutations from their fathers twice
as frequently as the offspring from the other three groups.
-
- This result suggests that the culprit is airborne particulate
matter: microscopic, breathable particles of soot and dust that are often
attached to toxic chemicals, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,
which can cause DNA mutations. These particles can penetrate deep into
the body.
-
- Research by Prof G¸nter Oberdrster at the University
of Rochester in New York has shown that the very smallest particles, called
nanoparticles, can become dispersed widely in the body after being inhaled.
They accumulate not only in the lungs but find their way to parts of the
brain.
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