Beijing’s Olympic Smog Shows Pollution’s Effect on Health

May 15th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

TUESDAY, May 15 (HealthDay News) — With the 2012 Olympics set to
begin in London this summer, a new study on air quality during the 2008
Beijing Olympics delivers an important public health message: Reducing air
pollution levels could lower the risk of heart trouble for many.

Four years ago, an international team of researchers took advantage of
changes in air quality surrounding the 2008 Olympics, to see what health
effects those changes might bring. The Chinese government had agreed to
limit the use of motor vehicles and the operating hours of power plants in
an effort to lower air pollution levels during the games. Once the
international sporting event, and the accompanying restrictions, had
ended, air pollution levels rebounded.

In the months before, during and after the 2008 Olympics, the
researchers took measurements from 125 medical residents in Beijing,
tracking their blood pressure and various biomarkers associated with heart
disease. They found that rising air pollution levels drove up blood
pressure and blood-clotting factors in the otherwise healthy medical
residents.

“Studies have shown an association between air pollution and strokes or
heart attacks,” said study author Junfeng (Jim) Zhang, a professor of
environmental and global health at the University of Southern California.
“[But] they have not really looked into what we have addressed, which is
how air pollution affects the heart.”

“If pollution continues, and the burdens of blood-clotting factors are
kept at elevated levels, I think there will be adverse consequences
long-term,” including increases in heart attacks, strokes and
cardiovascular deaths, Zhang added.

Previous research has also linked air pollution, especially the tiny
particles in exhaust fumes known as particulate matter, to asthma, lung
cancer and diabetes.

The study was published May 16 in the Journal of the American
Medical Association.

The researchers followed the medical residents, whose average age was
24, at a hospital in central Beijing. The participants were healthy and
were not smokers, reducing the chance that they might experience illness
unrelated to pollution during the study, Zhang said.

The team measured heart rate, blood pressure and blood levels of
biomarkers for each participant twice in the beginning of the summer
before the games, twice during the two months spanning the Olympics, and
twice in the fall after the games.

During those months, the researchers also monitored the daily level of
air pollutants, including particulate matter, ozone and carbon, in samples
taken from the hospital campus where the residents worked.

Two of the three biomarkers for blood clotting that the researchers
measured, called von Willebrand factor and CD62P, decreased in the two
months of the Olympic games. And the levels of one of them, CD62P, went
back up after the Olympics.

“These factors basically predict blood-clotting potential,” Zhang said.
“The higher their levels, the greater the possible risk of heart attack
and stroke.”

The researchers also found a post-Olympics increase in the
participants’ systolic blood pressure — the top number in a blood
pressure measurement — which has also been associated with heart disease
and stroke.

“It was a surprise to see big changes in the two blood-clotting markers
because we thought inflammatory markers might be more important,” Zhang
said.

The researchers did not see a statistically significant change in
indicators of inflammation, like white blood cell count and C-reactive
protein. However, Zhang said he suspects that if the researchers had
included a couple hundred more people, they would have seen changes in
inflammatory markers.

It is not clear from the study which of the pollutants might be driving
the changes in the blood-clotting factors and blood pressure; the levels
of nearly all of the pollutants that the team measured dropped during the
Olympics and went back up in its aftermath.

“It has proven difficult to figure out which is most toxic,” explained
Michael Jerrett, a professor of environmental health sciences at
University of California, Berkeley.

Instead, researchers tend to think a mix of pollutants that includes
particulate matter, carbon and nitrogen dioxide are the most dangerous.
“If we were to reduce carbon dioxide, we are going to get benefits in
terms of reduced levels of other pollutants that are strongly associated
with health effects,” Jerrett explained.

“Showing that you can achieve these major [pollution] reductions if you
are willing to put these controls in place is an important finding in and
of itself,” Jerrett added.

Previous research has found that decreases in particulate matter in the
United States during the 1980s and 1990s were responsible for 15 percent
of the increase in life expectancy during this period.

A lot of the pollution-control measures undertaken by the United States
and other wealthy industrialized countries for the past 30 years were
“low-hanging fruits, and measures now are quite costly,” Jerrett added.
“People making these decisions want to have certain evidence, and I think
this study adds to the body of evidence of the potential health
benefits.”

More information

To learn more about local air quality and health risks, visit State of the Air
2012.