Up to one-third of all new asthma cases each year are attributed to the harmful air pollutants that are emitted by gas-powered automobiles.
Up to one-third of all new asthma cases each year are attributed to the harmful air pollutants that are emitted by gas-powered automobiles.
To address this, our recent study has found that replacing around half of all gas-powered vehicles with electric vehicles could be sufficient to minimize childhood asthma cases linked to pollution from vehicle exhausts.
As researchers studying the intersection of transportation, climate change and public health, we wanted to understand whether electric vehicle sales were having any impact on human health. Given the growing electric vehicle market in the United States, we investigated the impact this growth is having on population health.
We chose childhood asthma as a proxy due to its widespread impact on the population. Around 5 million American children suffered from asthma in 2019. This statistic hasn’t changed considerably since then.
Numerous studies have shown that exposure to air pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter, which are emitted from the tailpipe of gas-powered automobiles when they burn fossil fuels, is linked with an increased risk of developing asthma. Our study builds on this by examining the number of gas-powered and electric vehicles on the road, and the number of new childhood asthma cases annually.
We used publicly available data on childhood asthma from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Then, we built a burden-of-disease model to isolate new cases of childhood asthma that were linked to traffic-related air pollution. We included data collected between 2013 and 2019 from all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
We found that for every 1,000 new gas-powered vehicles sold, there was one new case of childhood asthma. Our research revealed that replacing approximately 21% of these sales with electric vehicles appears to be sufficient to halt rising asthma rates caused by new vehicle sales.
