As the saying goes, “It’s not what you don’t know that’s a problem, it’s what you do know that just ain’t so.” This applies with a vengeance to the alleged relationship between high rates of asthma suffered by children in North Carolina’s mountains and ground-level ozone.
According to conventional wisdom, as propagated by environmental advocacy groups, some journalists, and most recently by senatorial candidate Erskine Bowles, worsening ozone pollution is causing an increasing number of children in mountainous regions of the state to suffer asthma attacks. This connection, however, cannot be supported by any data. Politicians who make such claims are engaging in scare mongering apparently to promote a political agenda.
The John Locke Foundation studied data from the N.C. Division of Air Quality and the State Center for Health Statistics to determine whether there was any correlation between ozone pollution and childhood asthma. The study concluded that there was no relationship between counties that registered a high number of high-ozone days and counties where an increasing number of children were hospitalized for asthma-related problems. This result was observed for all years (1995-1997 and 2000) and counties for which there was complete data available. If anything, asthma problems tended to be worse in counties that experienced little or no ozone problem. (High-ozone days are reported here on an average per-ozone-monitor basis.)
Contradicting statements made by Bowles and others, the most striking example of this “negative relationship” was observed in the state’s western counties. From 1995 to 1997 Swain and Buncombe counties reported some of the highest rates of asthma hospitalizations for children up to 14 years old in the state. On the other hand, these counties reported some of the fewest number of high-ozone days in the state.
Of the counties studied, Swain County reported the highest rate of hospital admissions for children suffering asthma (1,261 admissions per 100,000 in population), yet it registered no high-ozone days. For this same period Buncombe County, which also registered no high-ozone days, reported the fourth highest rate of asthma admissions (649 per 100,000). By comparison, Caswell County, on the north-central border with Virginia, reported the lowest asthma hospitalization rate (132 per 100,000) and the second highest number of high-ozone days (nine).
Similarly, in 2000 Lenoir County reported the highest rate of hospitalizations, yet the county registered only two high-ozone days. Swain County had the third highest asthma hospitalization rate and, once again, registered no high-ozone days.
The assertion that asthma sufferers in North Carolina’s mountains suffer from high levels of ozone pollution is not supported by data. It’s apparent the assertions have been made, not to enlighten the citizens of the region or to advance meaningful public health policies, but to scare the electorate into supporting a radical environmentalist agenda. While the hospitalization rate of children suffering asthma in western North Carolina has been high, ozone levels have not been high, nor have they increased over time. Voters should challenge environmental advocacy groups and politicians to reconcile their assertions with the facts.
Unfortunately, the most egregious result of the politicization of science is the great disservice that is done to asthma sufferers. While facts are distorted in order to advance feel-good legislation such as the “clean smokestacks” bill passed last summer, attention and resources are diverted from investigation of more-likely causes.