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Study Puts a Price Tag on Smog: Health Impact Said to Cost $1,000 a Person in San Joaquin Valley.

Posted on: Thursday, 30 March 2006, 12:00 CST

By Chris Bowman, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

Mar. 30--San Joaquin Valley residents effectively are paying an average of $1,000 a year just to breathe.

That's the cost of shortened life spans, hospitalizations, job absences and other economic and health effects of the region's chronically poor air quality, according to a study released Wednesday.

In a departure from the smoggy parlance of typical air pollution studies, the report, by economists at California State University, Fullerton, casts the problem in yearly effects that hit home:

* 260 hospital admissions.

* 460 premature deaths from heart and lung disease, among people ages 30 and older.

* 3,000 lost work days.

* 23,300 asthma attacks.

* 188,000 days of school absences.

* 188,400 days of "reduced activity" in adults.

"It's sobering to see the costs exacted by the Valley's polluted air," said Jane Hall, a Cal State Fullerton economics professor and lead author of the study.

Trapped between the Sierra Nevada and Coast Range, with two major highways running through it, the agricultural Valley hosts some of the most persistently dirty air in the country, rivaling Los Angeles and Houston. Dairies, cattle ranches and farms, which release smog-forming gases and ammonia, rank as major polluters.

No sooner do Valley residents get a break from ground-level ozone - the lung-searing gas in smog - than the wintertime siege of particle pollution begins.

As the report put it, "There is no 'clean' season in this region."

While the Valley has made some clean-air gains from emission controls, its rate of progress has been relatively flat compared with Sacramento and Los Angeles, said Frederick Lurmann, air pollution consultant and an author of the Valley study.

"It means you really need to adopt more aggressive and more effective (pollution) controls," Lurmann said Wednesday.

The researchers said they initiated the study to better convey the need for accelerated cleanup.

"It's a piece of the puzzle that gives policymakers more information to act more aggressively," Hall said.

The team of three researchers, including Vic Brajer, also an economics professor at Cal State Fullerton, reviewed dozens of peer-reviewed economic and scientific studies to identify and quantify the links between pollution levels, ill health and associated costs.

Throughout the San Joaquin Valley, the annual cost of not attaining the federal health-based standards for ozone and fine-particle pollution, such as soot, averages $1,000 for each of the 3 million residents, or a total of more than $3 billion, the study concluded.

The report noted that Latinos and African Americans experience more days of heavy pollution than the average Valley resident.

That's because the areas with the most chronic and severe pollution - Fresno and Bakersfield - have the highest percentages of Latinos and African Americans, Lurmann said.

The report, funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is available on the university's College of Business and Economics Web site - business.fullerton.edu - under the Institute for Economic and Environmental Studies.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The Sacramento Bee

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