Playing Russian roulette with our health

A recent editorial (An Over-Polluted And Overcrowded Country, March 2) highlighted our severe traffic pollution problem. Among other things the editorial referred to a Eurostat study which showed that Malta has the highest proportion of people in the EU who consider they live in a polluted environment.

The results of a newly published long-term study conducted in 10 European cities (Aphekom) reaffirmed that exposure to particulate matter – as typically present in the sooty smoke illegally emitted by diesel driven vehicles on our roads – results in an average decrease in life expectancy by 22 months.

The precise figure depends on the severity of exposure; with more severe exposure, as in Malta, life expectancy is diminished even more.

This report again emphasises that living on or near a busy road is responsible for a markedly raised prevalence of asthma in children and coronary heart disease in older people. The case for increases in cancer in residents who live in traffic-congested roads has already been made.

This study estimated that the savings in health and other costs if air quality were kept within WHO guidelines would amount to about €31.5 billion annually from savings on health expenditure, absenteeism and intangible costs such as well-being, life expectancy and quality of life. The results of this study can now be added to numerous other large-scale studies including the landmark Harvard Seven Cities survey and the extensive 16-year study on mortality in 500,000 adults conducted by the American Cancer Society.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the UK Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants (COMEAP) have long been emphasising that particulate air pollution is an especially dangerous environmental risk factor for excess mortality from heart disease and lung cancer. Further, it is common knowledge that the prevalence of asthma in certain parts of Malta is one of the highest recorded internationally.

Faced with such strong evidence of harm, all our health, environment and transport authorities could do was to ask citizens to become law enforcers by reporting vehicles which emitted black smoke.

There was initially a good response to the SMS reporting system until the public realised that the system was merely cosmetic. First of all there was no detectable difference in the number of vehicles emitting black smoke on our roads.

Secondly, it emerged at one point that the transport authority had disregarded 70,000 SMS reports made over a period of about 18 months and that members of the public who had conscientiously reported offending vehicles were wasting their time and money. As aptly put in a report in The Times (Emissions SMS Campaign Being Given Another Push, March 7) “things turned sour” when an indignant public discovered that they were being fooled. It is therefore not surprising that the reintroduction of the SMS system with “Emission Alert, SMS 4 clean air”, complete with a picture of a newborn baby was met by utter incredulity and anger by bloggers.

The Times report elicited the usual clunky, unconvincing defensive response from Transport Malta (Emissions Testing Scheme, March 10) but it remains quite unbelievable how TM, undeterred by the original SMS fiasco, is now trying to reinstate the SMS system when it is plain that it is now beyond resuscitation and as dead as a dodo because people have simply lost faith in it.

As pointed out in the (Aphekom) report by the European Respiratory Society, the public has no way of avoiding personal exposure to ambient air pollution if they live in a densely built-up area.

Given the scientifically proven threat to everybody’s health and, especially, that of our children, all that one can conclude is that TM and our Health Department are playing Russian roulette with our health. The time for futile gestures is past; the time for definitive action is long overdue.