Air pollution mortality science

An archive recording and transcript of perhaps the most important news show interview on this topic in over a decade.

I have a couple of pieces in press, and have been extremely busy. I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, so now seems like a good time. It’s an interview in 2017 on Talk Radio (now Talk TV) by Julia Hartley-Brewer and the late Professor Anthony Frew, who unfortunately died a few years later.

I am posting this now as The Royal College of Physicians (of which Frew was a member) has, on the green blob’s coin, again decided to kick up a fuss about air pollution, and again make the false claims about the risk of mortality. Khan, too, has announced his grantor’s new initiative to use such billionaires’ cash to tackle “misinformation”, according to his article in the Guardian, in which he claims he is the victim of a “vicious backlash”.

Listen to the interview, or read it below. I hope this will be a useful resource, and morale-booster for anyone wanting to counter Khan’s lies and smears. the science is not on his side.

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Transcript: Julia Hartley-Brewer & Professor Tony Frew interview. Talk Radio. April 2017.

Julia Hartley Brewer (JHB)

Tony Frew (TF)

JHB: Professor Tony Frew is on the line. He’s professor of respiratory medicine at the University of Brighton and has been a government advisor on this issue. Tony, thank you so much for joining us.

TF: Good morning.

JHB: Good morning. Now let’s Janet-and-John this, if you will – keep it nice and simple for those of us of a smaller medical and technical brain! So are forty-thousand people dying every year, prematurely, because of pollution in this country?

TF: Well, the simple answer to that is no – that’s not true. The figure… We know where the figure comes from, which is that there’s a very small impact on everybody from the air pollution that we breathe. This has been known about for twenty-five or more years, and it’s been quite difficult to know how to tell the general public about the problem. So there’s a government Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollution, and they thought about this quite a lot and published back in 2010 a paper that said that we know roughly how many, how much impact this had in the year 2008. And they worked out there was probably a total of 340 thousand life years that were lost. And that’s a bit of a life-insurance sort-of figure – that’s not the sort of thing most of us deal with.

JHB: That’s not 340 thousand people dying though is it.

TF: No it’s not. They reckon that possibly that was the total figure for the whole of the UK in relation to particles. Now, to put that in context, that means that’s three days off everybody’s life. And it sounds like an awful lot of life years, but it’s because the population is so large, what it meant is that the pollution that happened in 2008 may have meant that you died three days earlier eventually. That’s everybody, assuming that the risk applies to everybody. And this didn’t really sound very exciting, so they’ve sat down and they’ve said ‘well, if we’ve totted-up all those three-days and put them together, how many lives would it represent?’. And they came up with this figure of 29 thousand equivalent lives that were lost. So it’s not real people that died, with a death certificate that said air pollution. It’s trying to put that 340 thousand into numbers of people that…

JHB: If you added all those three-days up into your average, you know, seventy-five, seventy-eight, eighty years alive, that’s how many it would add up to?

TF: In crude terms, that’s how they did it. I mean, the maths of it are quite complicated…

JHB: And the 29 thousand figure is different from the 40 thousand figure that’s mostly bandied-about now. Why’s that?

TF: Well the reason for that is that there’s another pollutant called nitrogen oxides which are produced by burning fossil fuels [???] burning anything. And we have been doing really well in reducing particles, but we’re not doing quite so well in reducing nitrogen oxides. And people have wondered whether nitrogen oxides might also have an impact on death rates. Now the problem is that the things that produce nitrogen oxides also produce particles, so in the maths it’s quite difficult to separate those two things out. And the group that came together with the Royal College of Physicians’ report last year, they took a guess that there was a 30 per cent overlap between the two pollutants and said if you did that, it would come to about 40 thousand people, in terms… not [???] thousand people, but 40 thousand equivalent lives lost. And that’s where the 40 thousand figure comes from, and also where the 9 thousand that Sadiq Khan’s referring to in relation to London. Those are out of the… adding the nitrogen oxides to the particles…

JHB: But just clarify and get back… [???] I’ve heard different politicians use different figures, and often they’re using it as shorthand form, but mostly they’re using it incorrectly. 40 thousand people do not lie… die… every year. 40 thousand lives are not lost. It is…

TF: That’s correct.

JHB: It is 40 thousand equivalent lives, and that is effectively, if you look it up, three days off everyone’s life.

TF: Yeah. That’s for the one year. Absolutely. So if you lived in London all your life, where there’s slightly higher levels of pollution, and this was true, and you could get rid of all the pollution, which you can’t, you might be talking about six-to-nine months reduction in life expectancy from the current levels of pollution.

JHB: OK. And so when you say, ‘get rid of all pollution’, you mean getting rid of the nasty diesel cars and the big lorries and the buses?

TF: Well, if you look at where the pollution comes from… The first thing to say is that, the average level of particles in London is 14 micrograms per metre cubed. Let’s not worry about the unit, but 14 units. Of that, 7 is probably irrelevant because that’s the background level across the world as a whole and…

JHB: So that’s if you’re in the Amazon rainforest? It would be that?

TF: Yeah, you’d be getting that. And in terms of how much the traffic contributes, it contributes 2 of those 14. So if you got rid of all the traffic in London, that is you banned all cars, all trains, all motorcycles, everything except for walking, you could possibly get rid of 2 micrograms per meter cubed. So, roughly one seventh of the pollution. So when people are talking about, saying, ‘well we’re just going tinker with the price of driving a diesel car in London, the impact on people’s health is going to be pretty small because you’re not going to make a lot of difference to the particle levels. It’s important that people understand, pollution isn’t good for you, it’s obviously bad for you, but it’s not that bad for you…

JHB: Well hold on a minute, we’re talking about… The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, he’s been talking about how the air in London is toxic. And so presumably, pollution across the UK, particularly in our major cities like London, it’s going up, isn’t it?

TF: No…

JHB: No. Funny that!

TF: I went to school in Central London and I used to play football round the corner from the House of Parliament, and levels of pollution then were at least four times greater than they are now. So what’s been happening year-on-year, there’s been a decline in the amount of pollution. So what’s changed is that we’ve changed the targets. We’ve moved the goal posts in the sense of saying that we want pollution levels to be even lower than they are now. And we’ve signed-up to a UN agreement that we would reduce our pollution to a certain fraction of what it was before. And that’s… When people talk about things being ‘illegal’, and things, you know, not reaching targets, they’re aiming for a target in 2020, which we probably will meet in every city except London, Cardiff, Southampton and Derby. And those cities are being challenged to say how can they reduce their emission further to get down to the targets that have been set. But I mean, it’s not as toxic now as it used to be. It’s illegal because we made it illegal. So you know…

JHB: We changed the target, basically?

TF: We changed the target and then, so when people say that the levels of pollution is illegal, it’s illegal we said that’s illegal, not because it’s dangerous.

JHB: Well, wait a minute, we hear about children being admitted to hospital with more asthma… I live in a nice, I mean I live in fairly central London, but nice leafy street, I’m not living on a main road in Central London, lots of children go to school in places… Old people’s homes, you know, surely it has an effect on real people in their real daily lives.

TF: Absolutely. Pollution isn’t good for you. The sort of pollution we’re talking about does affect people who have asthma, it affects people who have chronic bronchitis and COPD, the chronic chest condition people get when they smoke. So if you’ve got those {conditions}, it is true the levels of pollution you get in London are a problem when they peak. And during the winter, you get temperature inversion and usually clear, cold days that air doesn’t move very much and the pollution builds up in the Thames Valley. So that’s the sort of conditions when people with asthma and COPD will be affected. But they’re not dying from it, their chests will get worse and they may get admitted to hospital if they’re really bad slightly more frequently than they would otherwise. So it is important that we do something about pollution, but we have to keep it in proportion. And concentrating on deaths and quoting that figure of 9 thousands in London or 40 thousand in the UK, which is wrong, it doesn’t help because it actually undermines public trust in the scientists and in the politicians.

JHB: There has been a real sort of [???] as motorists [????] attack on motorists. And absolutely we need cleaner cars, I’m all for that, all for cutting pollution, but [???] we’re told this is the big panacea. You said earlier that if we got rid of all traffic [???] trains as well as cars, lorries, buses, everything and it would reduce our pollution by a seventh, that would have you said a very small impact on people’s health. How much longer on average would we, each individually, live if we didn’t have any transport on roads at all other than walking and bicycles?

TF: Depending on where you live, between 20 and 40 days.

JHB: Yeah, so. Imagine being…

TF: So what that means for most of us, who, if you don’t have, you know, chronic respiratory conditions, you know, your average man is going to live to, you know his early eighties, average woman to her mid-eighties. And you’re going to die about a month later than you would otherwise do. And, you know, you won’t notice it because you won’t, you’re not going to say ‘well, I didn’t die today because [???] not driving a car’. [???] And so in politics, you need to have some benefit. If you’re going to put things on people and ask them to pay more taxes or pay more to buy a certain car or to drive a certain car in London, you know, you’ve got to think through when are you going to see the benefits? And it will take a very long time for any benefit to be apparent. And the actual benefit really is quite small to most of us. It might help some people with asthma and COPD. And we should be kind to them, but I think you know, the idea that it’s going to miraculously change the life expectancy of the population is wrong.

JHB: Can I ask you how we could cut those 40 thousand equivalent lives completely? So you’ve talked about have any traffic, got rid of all the cars off the road… If we were to say we don’t want a single person’s, even a minute of their lives to be cut, let alone a day, let alone months or years, to be cut off their lives as a result of any pollution in this country, we want to save those 40 thousand equivalent lives, what would have to do?

TF: You would have to have no… You would have to have completely renewable power. So all your heating and lighting came from things like wind power. You’d have to have no power stations. No building sites. No traffic. You know, it’s not going to happen. It would just be such a different lifestyle that you probably wouldn’t be able to live in the UK because it would be too cold. So, you know I think we have to have a sort-of common sense here, which is, we live longer lives now than we used to do. We live happier lives as a result of things that cause pollution. And we drive our cars because they’re convenient. If you can get better public transport, I’ll be happy to use it. But at the moment, there are lots of things I need my car for. And I’m sure everyone else would say the same.

JHB: Not just cars. Ambulances Lorries delivering fresh food.

TF: Yes. So there’s a whole bunch of things which we take for granted, which we rely on motorised transport. And in the long term, of course, we’re moving to electric buses, we’re.. What we’re doing is we’re displacing the pollution, so we make the pollution in a power station, and then we use the energy another day, so that in the Cromwell Road, you won’t have so many people generating pollution, but the pollution will be generated somewhere else, to provide the power, to make the electrical car work.

JHB: Yes, and create the battery and ship it overseas. You said earlier this erodes public trust in, well not just in politicians but in science. Would you like politicians, including the likes of Sadiq Khan, it’s not just on Labour’s side, it’s across the political parties, would you like them to stop using these incorrect figures? And when they say 40 thousand lives are lost as a result of pollution that they should be pulled-up on the fact that that is a statement that is provably false?

TF: Well the committee that put this together, and I should stress I used to be on the committee, I wasn’t on it at the time that it did this work, they are sensible people. They understand the science very well. And when they wrote that report, they said there is a risk that by using this figure, to make it easier for people to understand, that this will acquire a life of its own and will be incorrectly quoted. And that’s exactly what’s happened, which is that it’s an easy figure to latch on to, much easier to understand than the life-insurance aspect of what’s happening. And it’s what my brother calls a zombie statistic – however many times you try and kill it, it comes back. And it’s simply not true and I think there’s a danger that you get into arguing about the truth of the statistic and not into how can we make our cars cleaner, how can we deal with the small number of really dirty cars that should be taken off the roads, you know. Which is about MOTs and about emissions, and saying that if you’re going to charge people for driving a car, it should be related to the emissions of the car…

JHB: As opposed to the fact that it’s a car. Professor Tony Frew, what an absolute pleasure to speak to you. I think we’ll get that audio, we’ll put it online, I think we’ll also send it to Said Khan and his advisors to make sure that they and other politicians understand what the reality is on these figures. Tony Frew is a professor of respiratory medicine at the University of Brighton.