Sunday 1st.May 2011
Sunday 29th April 2007
HUNDREDS of baby deaths a year are being linked to pollution emitted by public waste incinerators.
Researchers have established a significantly
higher death rate among children up to one year old when they live under smoke
from an incinerator chimney.
There is a lower death rate for children who live out of the path of incinerator
emissions.
The report comes after a detailed analysis of death rates across the country.
Dr Dick van Steenis, a retired GP who helped head the study,
said: “The incinerators are burning all sorts of material from domestic
waste to hazardous chemical and radioactive waste.
“The danger comes from the particles released into the atmosphere. They
are of a size that can be easily inhaled into the lung where they lodge and
cause damage to the body.”
The most damaging particle, known as PM 2.5, is particularly harmful to youngsters
he said. “Newborn babies are more likely to succumb to damage from chemical
pollutants in these inhaled particles.” He added: “Around every
single incinerator, infant mortality rates, asthma rates and autism rates are
sky-high.
“That’s if you live under the smoke stream from the chimney. In
areas nearby which don’t get the smoke, the death rate is either at the
national average or lower.”
The data has been collected from the latest official statistics covering the
years 2003 to 2005.
Enfield in north London has the UK’s largest
incinerator at Edmonton. The death rate for babies up one year old in west
of the borough is virtually nil.
But in eastern Enfield, which sits downwind of the incinerator and is exposed
to smoke from the chimney, the death rate is between 10 and 12 per thousand
of population. The national average death rate for babies up to a year is 5.2
per thousand.
Dr van Steenis said that he had accounted for other factors that could increase
the death rate such as social deprivation. He pointed out, for example, that “leafy
middle-class areas” of west London were affected by emissions from a
big incinerator at Colnbrook near Slough. In some parts around this plant infant
mortality rates are treble the national average.
“We compared those areas with nearby well-to-do wards that didn’t
get emissions and they were significantly lower than the national average.”
Professor Vyvyan Howard, an expert on environmental pollution from the University
of Ulster, said dioxins released in the burning of rubbish had been shown to
be cancer causing.
He said that while incinerator filters take out 99 per cent of particles, it
is the ultra fine one per cent – the PM 2.5s – that can
have chronic effects on health.
London Waste, which owns the Edmonton incinerator, said it had not seen the
van Steenis report. A spokesman said: “We use a proven technology with
a track record of safe operation and it is recognised throughout Europe as
a safe and efficient method of energy generation.
“There is no consistent evidence that our facilities cause adverse
health effects.
“We continually monitor particulates such as PM 2.5s and the levels
released are lower than the maximum permitted.”