It may be a platitude that fresh, clean air is good for you, but now researchers have quantified how much cleaning up air pollution has improved the public health: It has boosted the lifespan of the average American city-dweller by five months. Coauthor Majid Ezzatin explains that when his team examined
three decades of health data from 51 U.S. cities, researchers found that people are living about three years longer than they did before. Controlling for changes in income, education, demographics and smoking, about five months of that can be chalked up to air improvements.... "Rather than just saying pollution is bad for health," he said, "we can say that regulations are good for health" [Wired News].
For the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers compared data collected in 1980 and 2000, three decades over which air pollution regulations tightened significantly. Lead researcher C. Arden Pope ...
