Monday, 25th November 2019,
Press Release: Citizens Environmental Advocacy Centre

Most countries now include vehicle emission testing of all vehicles during mechanical fitness every year but still not in NZ.

Why not?

This recent World health Organisation research site below shows graphically that our Government now must include vehicle exhaust in the fitness testing of NZ vehicles for very good reasons, especially for community health, safety and well-being.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/more-lifestyle/air-pollution-lowers-brain-function-can-lead-to-lower-verbal-and-maths-scores/story-8pAa9sAokCm4BE0G24fc4O.html

QUOTE; headline;

“Air pollution lowers brain function, can lead to lower verbal and maths scores;

The world’s top 20 most polluted cities, according to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) database, are in developing countries.

Almost all the cities in low- and middle-income countries with more than 1,00,000 residents fail to meet WHO air quality guidelines.

Long-term exposure to air pollution lowers brain function, which reflects in decreased verbal and mathematics scores, apart from causing heart disease and breathing problems, a new study from China has said.

“... a narrow focus on the negative effect on health may underestimate the total cost of air pollution. Our findings imply that the indirect effect of pollution on social welfare could be much larger than previously thought,” Xiaobo Zhang, one of the authors of the paper, said.

The study retrospectively analysed data of nearly 32,000 people from two waves (2010 and 2014) of the China Family Panel Study, a nationally representative longitudinal survey that looks at topics like economic activities, education outcome, family dynamics, relationships, and health.”

Unquote;

• The report study emphasises the cognitive ability module of the test has standardised mathematics and word-recognition questions, and was sorted in ascending order of difficulty.

• The score given was the highest rank of a question that a person was able to answer.

• This dataset was then compared to the local pollution data, which shows that the brain has lost cognitive function and this is a now confirmed that air pollution is now a serious cause of brain damage.
• QUOTE;

“We speculate that the pollutant damage is most likely accumulating in the white matter of the brain which is mainly associated with the language functioning. The negative impact of three-year accumulative exposure to air pollution for men’s verbal test scores is 49% higher than that for women,” Zhang, who is also a senior research fellow with the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), said”.

Unquote;

We at CEAC say this research had estimated that reducing fine particulate matter concentrations to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standard (50 g/m3) would increase verbal and math scores by 2.41 and 0.39 points, and this shows why we need to measure vehicle emissions now.

Though the research was conducted in China, we consider as a major trading partner now we in NZ should support the researchers suggestions that the implications would be true for all developing countries, including India and elsewhere where industrial and transport activities are increasing such as NZ.

The world’s top 20 most polluted cities, according to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) database, are in developing countries.

CEAC say this is very good “environmental stewardship” our Government now should embrace for our ‘public community health and wellbeing.’

END

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