Warning: Breathing the Air in Beijing May be Hazardous to Your Health

This week saw the blogosphere explode over how bad the air in Beijing has become.  Now, in fairness, the air in Beijing specifically (and China generally) has been awful for a long time.  If you grew up somewhere with high humidity you can appreciate that certain times of year you feel as if the air has weight; well, in China, at certain times of year you can both feel and taste the air, and it isn’t a good taste.  What appears to be happening, as has been written about extensively by others, is a unique alignment of many factors:  particularly bad dust storms from outside Beijing, unfettered construction building throwing concrete dust into the air, factories spewing air-born contaminants, seasonal trash burning outside the city, people and utility providers firing up their coal burning systems to heat themselves during winter, etc., etc., etc.  You get the point – the pollution is a combination of a lot of bad things getting thrown into the air (take a look at the this video for the gritty first-hand experience).

As Jim Fallows pointed out earlier this week, this isn’t just any pollution; no, this is a particularly deadly type of micro-particulate that is smaller than 2.5 microns (also reference as PM2.5).  My friend Chris Buckley owns Torana Clean Air, a home household air-cleaning appliance company, located in Beijing.  As you might imagine, business is booming.  NPR interviewed him earlier this week to talk about how pollution makes its way into the house, thereby making it necessary to have personal air cleaners.  On his company site, Chris notes that the type of PM2.5 micro-particulate pollution is responsible for 1611 premature deaths in the cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth Australia.  Respectively, these cities have approximately 4.5m, 4.1m, 2.0m, and 1.7m (about 12.3m) spread across 4 cities and as many territories.  The cities are separated by thousands of miles, and the primary cause of mortality is smoking, not necessarily pollution.  Beijing has, at last count, over 19.6m people and has, despite the city’s efforts to control it, a lot of smokers and a level of pollution that is almost impossible to imagine if you’ve never been to the city.  It’s almost too terrible to think about the long term impact on mortality figures in Beijing specifically, but China more generally, related to these problems.

Guesses about what the actual mortality figures for people living in Beijing are just that, guesses.  As three academics at Fudan University write in a recent report titled “Health Impact of Outdoor Air Pollution in China”, there have been “relatively few studies [that] have examined long-term effects of air pollution in China.”  They then go on to drop what I think is an especially troubling comment, “Several prospective cohort studies in North America and Europe have estimated effects of long-term exposure to air pollution on mortality, but it is not clear whether the findings from developed countries apply to China, given differences in the levels and characteristics of air pollution.”  (emphasis mine)  The bottom line is that as a number of experts have suggested, their best guess is that living in Beijing can take between 5-6 years off of your life, but no one really knows exactly how severe the impact of long-term inhalation of these sort of micro-contaminants will be.

There may be no other place in the world today, and perhaps even in our shared history as a species, where we see more clearly the environmental and health impacts of modernization and industry.  Long-term, China’s healthcare policy will need to take into account the sort of services and treatment regimes for the problems its rapid modernization has created.  Progress is never without pain or problems, but if Beijing’s air quality leads to major healthcare costs down the road, it will beg the question for future modernizing third world countries of what they can do differently.