2019-10-14 Bloomberg Businessweek-Europe Edition

asthma.Britishpeopletendedtoshrugwhenweaskedthem

abouttheair.“It’snotasbadasIndia’s,is it?”they’dsay.

I discoveredanundercurrentofagonizingstoriesfrom

pollutionémigrés:thebicyclistterrifiedbyanasthma

attack;thedoctoralcandidatefroma ruraltownwhogave

upherdreamtofleetheLondonair.I wasfeelingtrapped

andworriedforourownchildren.Wasit alljustconfirma-

tionbias?WasthereanyhardevidencetoprovewhatI felt

inmychest?WhateverhappenswithBrexit,thismuchis

certain:Fordecades,Europewillbeunitedbyfilthyair

anda slowlyunfoldingpublic-healthcrisiscausedbyits

embraceofdiesel—something that was supposed to heal

the environment.

King’s College London operates the world’s most extensive

network of air-monitoring stations, 117 of them in almost

all of London’s 32  boroughs. Their instruments gener-

ate a pollution map marked red for the highest levels and

green for the lowest. The result is something like a blood-

shot eye: red in the city’s center and down the arteries of

major roads. It’s a visual representation of what makes this

era of traffic-borne pollution so insidious. Conditions are

worst exactly where the most people live. Nitrogen oxides

produced by the combustion of diesel engines react with

air to form NO2, a toxic gas that inflames the lung, heart,

and brain and has been linked to cancer and dementia in

addition to respiratory illnesses. Diesel tailpipes also pro-

duce tiny particles known as PM2.5s. A secondary pollutant,

ozone, forms when the pollutants react with sunlight—and

those levels, too, have worsened with climate change.

London has exceeded EU limits for NO2 since 2010, and

levelsarealsohighinMunich,Paris,andothercitiesthat

embraceddiesel.SomedaysinLondon,theaveragelevel

ishigherthaninBeijing,morethandoublingthelegal

maximum.

I visited Frank Kelly, head of the Environmental Research

Group at King’s College, in his office not far from the teem-

ing traffic of Waterloo Bridge. His early research focused

on how to give premature babies the right amount of oxy-

gen to save them without hurting them; in recent years he’s

overseen efforts to determine safe levels for pollutants. He

hasn’t found them. And he gets especially frustrated by the

fatalist streak of people who say the air could be worse.

“You’ve got to bring this home,” he tells me. “It’s you, your

children if you live in London. As an educated society, we

shouldn’t do this to people.”

Instudyafterstudy,thecollegehasshownevidence

ofdramatichealtheffects.Onefoundthatpollutantson

traffic-clogged Oxford Street wiped out the respiratory

benefits of a walk there for people over 60. Another found

teenagers living in dirtier air had 70% greater odds of devel-

oping psychosis. A third followed 2,500 schoolchildren in

east London over seven years. By the end, those who’d

breathed the most NO2 had lungs as much as 8% smaller.

Kelly calls that “a clinically important” decrease. Lungs only

grow until age 18, and their capacity starts dropping at 30.

If the organ starts out smaller, people are more likely to

have worse outcomes: twitchy, reactive lungs that develop

asthma or other respiratory diseases. “It’s a really strong

marker for later problems in life,” he says. Dutch research-

ers estimate 33% of new childhood asthma cases in Europe

are caused by air pollution.

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