Stanford study links air pollution to infant mortality

The Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment found a connection between air pollution and infant mortality, according to a Stanford news release.

The study focused on the dust that traveled from the Sahara Desert thousands of miles to look at the impact air pollution has on infant mortality. The study found that the change in the climate either mitigates or intensifies the issue.

“Africa and other developing regions have made remarkable strides overall in improving child health in recent decades, but key negative outcomes such as infant mortality remain stubbornly high in some places,” Marshall Burke, an associate professor of Earth system science in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences and the study's senior author, said in the release. “We wanted to understand why that was, and whether there was a connection to air pollution, a known cause of poor health."

The study found that children under the age of 5 are more vulnerable to the tiny particles in air pollution, which can cause many negative health impacts. It also found in certain developing regions where there are high levels of air pollution during a child's early years, their life expectancy is reduced by 4 to 5 years on average.

The researchers in the study found that solar-powered irrigation systems in desert areas would stop the deaths of 37,000 infants in West Africa.

“Standard policy instruments can’t be counted on to reduce all forms of air pollution,” Sam Heft-Neal, a research scholar at Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment and a lead author on the paper, said in the release. “While our calculation doesn’t consider logistical constraints to project deployment, it highlights the possibility of a solution that targets natural pollution sources and yields enormous benefits at a modest cost.”

The results were published in June in Nature Sustainability.