Top headlines
Lead story
Like residents across many parts of the Midwest and Northeast, Philadelphians breathed in a lot of smoke last week from the wildfires burning in Canada. I watched the city’s air quality creep from code orange to red and then purple, and wondered how it might affect my 9-year-old’s growing lungs or my niece’s asthma.
But there are few groups more vulnerable to bad air than premature babies.
Dr. Tim Nelin works in neonatal intensive care units in Philadelphia, and much of his research focuses on infants with bronchopulmonary dysplasia, or BPD – a chronic lung disease that affects many babies who are born very prematurely.
In a study of nearly 400 preterm babies, Nelin found that for infants with the mildest and most common form of BPD, even small increases in air pollution were linked to substantially higher odds of developing a respiratory illness severe enough to require emergency care. Babies who breathed even slightly worse air during their first year of life also had a higher risk of developing asthma by age 5.
“In other words,” Nelin writes, “what a baby breathes in the months after going home may be associated with respiratory health years later.”
[ Sign up for our weekly Global Economy & Business newsletter, with expert perspectives from around the world. ]
