Airborne Fine Particulate Matter and Short-Term Mortality

Mick West

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Steve Milloy of junkscience.com has posted a paper he claims debunks an EPA claim:

http://junkscience.com/2013/12/26/e...-ever-assembled-on-particulate-matter-deaths/ (http://archive.is/PNB4u)

Now I suspect this is bunk. Firstly because Milloy starts out with the statement:


The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulates ambient airborne fine particulate matter (PM2.5) on the basis that it is causally associated with short-term mortality — i.e., daily increases in PM2.5 cause increases in daily deaths.
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Yet he does not quote the exact claim, or the quantities (if any) involved in that claim. Nor does he note that this is NOT the the entire basis of the EPA's justification for regulating PM2.5. And he then goes on to title his post:

EPA air pollution scare debunked
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With the implication that there's no need for the EPA to regulate PM2.5.

This is not your typical debunk, as the claims are quite complex, and hidden in very large and difficult to read documents and datasets. So it's quite easy to make a claim and have it be obscured by the fog of science.

Milloy has a long history of denying various things, such as the health effects of secondhand smoke, global warming, evolution, and the safety of DDT. While this does not make everything he says false, it does tend to point to the need for additional scrutiny.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Milloy

(Milloy and EPA PDFs attached)
 

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sounds like he suspects its bunk too. he's basically saying all sides of the issue in one article. weird.
Although this is only an epidemiologic or statistical study that cannot absolutely exclude the possibility that PM2.5 actually affects mortality in some small and as yet unknown way, these results also illustrate that it would be virtually impossible to demonstrate through epidemiologic study that such an effect actually exists.
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ddt? as in the eagle killer pesticide?

edit huh scratch that http://www.foxnews.com/story/2006/07/06/bald-eagle-ddt-myth-still-flying-high/
 
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It is long term exposure to PM 2.5 that is the risk factor, especially in people with pre-existing conditions. This makes for an interesting read and there is a part that claims it may contribute in 3 or 5% of some deaths http://www.euro.who.int/__data/asse...h-effects-of-particulate-matter-final-Eng.pdf

Ideally for a study to show causality one would need post mortem results rather than death certificate data.


Sorry I am away to bed, but will just leave this.
 
sounds like he suspects its bunk too. he's basically saying all sides of the issue in one article. weird.
Although this is only an epidemiologic or statistical study that cannot absolutely exclude the possibility that PM2.5 actually affects mortality in some small and as yet unknown way, these results also illustrate that it would be virtually impossible to demonstrate through epidemiologic study that such an effect actually exists.
Content from External Source

Milloy thinks (or at least claims) that the EPA study is bunk. He wrote the linked paper (or at least it's attributed to his web site). He's basically saying in the above that the EPA has no evidence to back up their claims (and hence is inferring all restrictions on PM2.5 should be lifted, EPA disbanded, etc....)

Basically he's focussing on one small thing, and at best has demonstrated that it is small.
 
yea but he's also saying he has no evidence. AND he's 'proving' that even if the EPA did find results (3 years is a pretty pathetically small study) it cant ever really be tied to PM2s ergo they don't really need evidence to continue monitoring.

I don't really know what he's saying. but I don't know his prior work.
 
yea but he's also saying he has no evidence. AND he's 'proving' that even if the EPA did find results (3 years is a pretty pathetically small study) it cant ever really be tied to PM2s ergo they don't really need evidence to continue monitoring.

I don't really know what he's saying. but I don't know his prior work.

He's saying that the statistics he used show there is no detectable correlations between increased exposure to PM2.5 and death within 2 days.
 
I guess. but he says a lot of other stuff too like " there is no information on actual exposures". and his charts don't really match some of the stuff he says.
 
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