LONDON (Reuters) – German researchers say they have found some of the strongest evidence yet linking traffic pollution to childhood allergies.
The risk of developing asthma, hay fever, eczema or other allergies is about 50 percent higher for children living 50 metres (yards) from a busy road than for those living 1,000 meters away, they said in a study released on Friday.
Previous research has linked pollution to allergies, but to date observational studies in the field have been inconsistent, said Joachim Heinrich, an epidemiologist at the Helmholtz Research Centre for Environment and Health in Munich.
“We consistently found strong associations between the distance to the nearest main road and the allergic disease outcomes,” Heinrich, who led the study, wrote in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
The study followed 3,000 healthy children from all over Munich for six years from birth to determine rates of allergy-related diseases and exposure to traffic pollution.
The researchers mapped each residential address and the distance to busy roads, then developed a model to calculate exposure to pollution at birth and age two, three and six.
A busy road was considered one used by 10,000 cars each day.
“We developed a model to predict air pollution concentration at one point in a metropolitan area,” Heinrich said in a telephone interview.
This allowed the researchers to monitor more than one site as well as follow a large group of children over a long period of time, things many other studies did not do, Heinrich said.
The researchers will continue monitoring the children over the next few years to determine whether moving to a less-polluted area can reverse any of the traffic pollution-related problems, he added.
(Reporting by Michael Kahn; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
Americans spent $11 billion on doctors’ bills, prescription drugs and other treatments for allergies in 2005, according to government statistics released on Wednesday.
Sneezing, itchy eyes and other miseries caused by allergies sent 22 million Americans to a doctor that year, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
The money they spent is nearly double the $6 billion spent in 2000 on allergies, the agency said.
Of the $11 billion, doctor visits accounted for $4 billion and prescription drugs cost $7 billion.
Between 2000 and 2005, average annual spending on treatment of allergies jumped from $350 per person to $520 per person, the agency’s Anita Soni said.
“These expenditures do not include ‘over-the-counter’ medications used for treatment of allergic rhinitis,” the report reads.
“Many popular prescription medications such as Zyrtec and Claritin used for treatment of allergic rhinitis (that) are currently sold as ‘over-the-counter,’ were sold as prescription drugs only in years 2000 and 2005, thus are included in the expenditures.”
Claritin, known and sold generically as loratidine, is made by Schering-Plough Corp. while Johnson & Johnson acquired Zyrtec, or cetirizine, when it bought Pfizer Consumer Health.
(Reporting by Maggie Fox, editing by Will Dunham)
I don’t believe this, where are the sources?