How the Government Controlled Air Pollution at the Beijing Olympics

Estimated Reduction in Cancer Risk due to PAH Exposures if Source Control Measures during the 2008 Beijing Olympics were Sustained (31 page pdf, Environ Health Perspect, Feb.8, 2011)

The 2008 Olympics and the significant efforts made to reduce sources of air pollution during the games offered a unique opportunity to assess the effectiveness of the control methods in terms of reduced health risk of cancer from inhaling this pollution. The article reviewed today provides several measures of the positive impact of these reductions.

Key Quotes:

“300,000 people die each year in China from heart disease and lung cancer associated with exposure to ambient air pollution, including carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)…an average of 6.5 per million people in China are estimated to have lung cancer due to PAH inhalation exposure and populations in major Chinese cities have a higher risk of lung cancer than average for China”

“Chinese megacities, including Beijing, suffer from severe air pollution due to increasing coal combustion and motor vehicle emissions..PAH emissions from biomass and coal combustion for heating and cooking are a dominant source of indoor air pollution in China”

“Emissions from the power plants, coal-fired boilers, and several heavy-polluting factories in Beijing were reduced by 30-50% during the Olympic Games”

“A key component of the source control measures during the Beijing Olympics was restriction of on-road vehicles, in addition to industrial emission controls….As a result, the traffic volume was reduced by ~32% during the source control period….However, the number of vehicles in Beijing is increasing by 13% per year, with 4 million vehicles in 2009”

“the lifetime excess inhalation cancer risk due to exposure to the 17 carcinogenic PAHs was estimated to range from 6.5 to 518 per million people for the source control period concentrations.. This corresponded to a 46% reduction in the estimated inhalation cancer risk”

Related articles

• Pollution controls used during China Olympics could save lives if continued (eurekalert.org)
• Pollution controls used during China Olympics could save lives if continued (scienceblog.com)
• Beijing Air Pollution Controls Would Cut Lung Cancer Cases by Half (e360.yale.edu)
• Beijing Air Pollution off the Charts (ecoworld.com)