Air pollution from truck vehicle exhaust pipe on road, exhaust fumes concept
Zero emission trucks would make Central Pa. healthier; Asthma prevalent in Harrisburg region
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Scott LaMar
Air pollution from truck vehicle exhaust pipe on road, exhaust fumes concept
Airdate: October 07, 2022
A recent report from the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of American listed Harrisburg at number seven nationally in their list of the Top Asthma Capitals in the country. That means Pennsylvania’s capital city has one of the highest prevalences of asthma nationally.
Dr. Albert Rizzo, who is the Chief Mission Officer for the American Lung Association explained on Friday’s Smart Talk what went into the ranking,”Looking at the prevalence and importantly looking at the hospitalization rate and all too often now the death from asthma, which really is shocking now that we have so many good drugs to treat asthma and the recent potential increase may have something to do with COVID. The last couple of years, access to care was limited a bit. People did not go as often as they should for a routine. Care and asthma represents one of the really most chronic illnesses of children. So they need ongoing care interaction with their health care team. And I think that may have contributed to some of the increased hospitalization and potentially the deaths.”
The Lung Association is supporting state legislation that would allow a trained school nurse, teacher or counselor to administer medication to a child suffering from an asthma attack. Bryan Burton, Advocacy Manager, Healthy Air, American Lung Association told Smart Talk,”Schools are not allowed to administer the albuterol themselves to the child. The child can only self-administer and only if he has a prescription already on file with the school or the school nurse. But there is a very odd set of circumstances where the child either wouldn’t have a prescription, he may not have his inhaler with him. It might be empty, it might be expired or malfunctioning, or he may not even know he has asthma.”
Also, the American Lung Association is out with a report of how many lives could be saved by transitioning to zero emission trucks and other vehicles.
Burton indicated it’s important for clean air and health to get older, dirtier trucks off the road,”You define a high truck corridor as about 8500 trucks a day. South central Pennsylvania has about three times that many. And this is where sort of the environmental justice issue comes into play, because it’s a question of who’s living in and around these high transportation corridor areas. Are they lower income people with maybe less access to health care? And also, we have had studies confirm what we already suspected, which is that the the oldest trucks are by far the dirtiest. As you see trucks on the road, you sort of are seeing the history of the Clean Air Act drive by because you have trucks of different model years, have different pollution controls on them. So those older than 2007 are by far the dirtiest. That’s the year a particulate filter was required on heavy duty trucks. Then in 2010, they were required to have a selective catalytic converter systems as well. So, the newer the trucks are, the cleaner they’re going to be. But unfortunately, there’s still a tremendous amount of these I wouldn’t say a tremendous amount, but enough of these oldest, dirtiest trucks on the road that are creating the vast majority of the pollution. So we need to get them off the road and there’s various tools to do that, one of which would be to start transitioning in the long term to zero emission trucks, which would be either electric or potentially using hydrogen. In the short term, it’s important to have public policy that tries to retrofit remove those dirtiest trucks off the road.”
