Smoggy Science: Hot air from the American Lung Association.
May 15, 2001
By Diane Katz & Henry Payne
Copyright 2001 National Review Online

On May 1st, Americans everywhere awoke to a national air-quality crisis.

"Kansas City area air pollution called health risk" shouted a headline on page one of the Kansas City Star. "More Americans face risk of high smog levels" declared USA Today. "More than half the nation live in places where there are dangerous levels of ozone and smog in the air," announced ABC News anchor Peter Jennings. Similar warnings appeared in almost every major newspaper and TV news program in the country.

The source of this alarm was a new "study" by the American Lung Association, which warned that worsening smog threatened the health of some 141 million citizens. Dire news, if true. And why question the pronouncements of so venerable a public-health charity? Reporters certainly didn't - every news account took the ALA at its word.

But the ALA is dead wrong on the science, and, apparently, purposefully spewing fearsome propaganda for political gain.

In conjunction with Clean Air Week, the Lung Association issued its State of the Air 2001 report, which asserts that air pollution is "contributing substantially to the nation's ill health" and affecting "many more people." These conclusions, the ALA maintains, are based on "a careful analysis of ... concrete data and sound science."
In fact, emissions of smog-forming compounds have been falling for years, resulting in greatly improved air quality. Only by manipulating how air quality is measured could the Lung Association conclude otherwise.

The Clean Air Act requires states to meet federal air-quality standards or implement plans to achieve and maintain allowable levels of emissions. Under the current standard, ground-level ozone (smog) cannot exceed .12 parts per million in an hour's time at any single monitoring site for more than three days over three years.

The Lung Association, however, applied a far more stringent standard in compiling its list of counties with "unhealthy air." The standard utilized by the association was devised by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1997, but has never been enacted. It remains under court review as entirely lacking in scientific validity.

Beyond all its rhetoric about saving children's lives, the EPA has not documented any difference in lung function among subjects exposed to ozone concentrations below levels currently allowed. The agency's own scientific advisory board has concluded that there was no "bright line" distinguishing the proposed standard as more protective of public health. (As it is, "natural" emissions from trees and vegetation can produce ozone levels of .07 parts per million.)

But tightening the regulations would throw hundreds of counties into noncompliance and allow the EPA to expand its regulatory reach, enabling the agency to impose auto-inspection and maintenance programs, to sell reformulated fuels, and to place limits on industrial expansion.

The Lung Association has long supported such mandates, and even has sued the federal government to impose stricter regulations. In applying this questionable standard, then, the association appears to be more intent on serving its political interests than improving public health. After all, charity empires are difficult to maintain if donors no longer believe an imminent threat requires their immediate generosity.

The ALA report is also misleading in characterizing ozone as a worsening problem. Millions more Americans are breathing unhealthy air, the association claims. But 65 percent of the 24 million people living in what the ALA has deemed America's "most ozone-polluted" cities are residents of California, which has unique air-quality problems.

This isn't the first time the association has favored its "mission" over the truth. It all but ignored the discovery of streptomycin and other anti-TB drugs in the 1940s and 1950s for fear it would go out of business. Before too long, what had been the Tuberculosis and Respiratory Disease Association became the more amorphous American Lung Association, branching out in search of other health threats.

To the extent that the nation's resources are diverted to counter false threats, the real ones go ignored. And in sacrificing its credibility for political gain, the ALA will be less able to attract the support necessary to help those truly in need.