Clean Water Action will host a community meeting about the Allegheny County Health Department’s work to develop a plan to clean up the air pollution in the Liberty Borough-Clairton area on June 6 at 6 p.m. at the Clairton Municipal Building at 551 Ravensburg Boulevard in Clairton.

For the first time ever, last year’s annual average of PM 2.5, or soot, in the Liberty/Clairton area was below the current health standard set by the EPA, which is a cause for optimism. Now the health department is developing a State Implementation Plan to bring the Clairton area into compliance with the EPA’s daily standard for soot, which is scheduled for completion this December. The plan would make sure that the dose of soot that residents are exposed to in any given 24-hour period is kept below the federal health standard.

Failure to meet this goal can result in fines and reductions in federal aid to our region. The 24-hour, or daily standard, is also very important because many studies have shown that high, but short-term doses of soot can trigger severe asthma attacks, heart attacks and other health problems.

Clean Water Action is recommending a plan that would include taking steps such as:

=Requiring all industrial sources of pollution to reduce their harmful emissions on Ozone Action Days when the air quality is especially bad.

= Regulating emissions from coke plants during a process called soaking.

= Regulating chemical emissions that get turned into soot after they are released.

= Requiring industrial facilities to install fence line monitoring equipment and make data from these monitors available to the public online.

For more information, contact Clean Water Action at 412-765-3053 or visit www.cleanwateraction.org/pa/pittsburgh.

Looking for something fun to do with your family and friends this summer? Then sign up the Healthy Air Walks with GASP series sponsored by the Group Against Smog and Pollution and Venture Outdoors.

Participants will join GASP and nature experts on a stroll through Pittsburgh’s magnificent parks, covering two to three miles while learning about the history, flora and fauna that surrounds them. After each walk, hikers will enjoy a delicious snack together.

The series is an event of GASP’s Athletes United for Healthy Air campaign, according to Jamin Bogi, the organization’s education and outreach coordinator. ”The idea is that the air quality is better when you are surrounded by nature,” Bogi says. “We want to teach people ways to exercise while reducing their exposure to air pollution and hopefully encourage them to take action to clean up the air in our region.”

The first hike will take place Sunday, June 3 in Frick Park. The series will continue on July 1 in Highland Park, August 5 in Riverview Park and September 2 in Schenley Park.

For more information, call Venture Outdoors at 412-255-0564.

Note: The June 3 walk has been rescheduled for October due to inclement weather. Please stay tuned for more information about the new date.

Join us Friday, May 25 at 7:05 p.m. as the Pittsburgh Pirates take on the Chicago Cubs to kick off the Memorial Day weekend. All fans will receive a Pirates T-shirt featuring the Breathe Project logo–there will be 35,000 shirts available!

We are also proud to announce that the Pittsburgh Pirates organization is the newest coalition member of the Breathe Project, joining the winning team of businesses, groups and individuals in southwestern Pennsylvania all working together to improve our air quality. Certainly all athletes–including baseball players from the Majors to the Pee Wee Leagues–have the right to exercise and play in clean air.

Here is some information on steps the Pirates have taken to help clean our air as part of the “Let’s Go Bucs. Let’s Go Green.” program, including monitoring and reducing energy consumption to make PNC Park more energy efficient. For instance, motion sensors were installed in all mechanical rooms, restrooms and some common areas. Elevator and concession lighting was switched from incandescent to compact fluorescent. The ballpark’s HVAC system is on a timer and uses outdoor air to condition interior areas when the air temperature allows. And all Pirates U.S.-based scouts drive Chevy flex fuel vehicles.

Thank you to our favorite hometown ball club for helping us hit a home run for the health and future of our communities and economy.

Throwing out the first pitch at Friday’s game will be a group of high school students from the Student Conservation Association (SCA), a national leader in youth service and stewardship. They include: Desiree Johnson, 15, a 10th grader at Pittsburgh Brashear High School; Shardae Jones, 15, a 10th grader at Pittsburgh Carrick High School; Deja Sims, 16, a 10th grader at Pittsburgh Allderdice High School; and Jabari Anderson, 15, a 10th grader at Pittsburgh Science and Technology Academy.

These teens participated this past school year as crew members in the SCA’s Leadership in the Environment Advancement Program, a job readiness curriculum for urban Pittsburgh youth. Also part of the team was Jeffrey Edge, a 10th grader at Pittsburgh Perry High School. The students gained hands-on work experience in conservation and participated in work skills development and leadership training. They also planned a community action project focused on air quality.

“They saw air quality as something that affects everyone who lives in Pittsburgh, as an issue with broad appeal,” says Lauren George, program coordinator at SCA. The group also was motivated to focus on clean air issues because one of the students has asthma and couldn’t work outdoors, where her breathing troubles were exacerbated, George says.

For their action project, the students were engaged with a team of senior leaders participating in Leadership Pittsburgh Inc.’s Leadership Pittsburgh Program, who were challenged to impact the nexus between youth, health and our environment working in partnership with the SCA crew.

Together, they first inventoried the ecological strengths and needs of local neighborhoods before eventually agreeing to concentrate their efforts in the city’s North Side. Next, they developed a three-mile scavenger hunt-style walk near Lake Elizabeth in Allegheny Commons, calling it “A Healthy MOVEment.” Participants followed various routes to eight stations, and at each station, they answered a sustainability trivia question. Each correct answer earned a raffle ticket for fitness-related prizes. Participants also calculated how much they reduced their carbon footprint by walking, rather than driving, their route.

“These young people wanted to share what they’ve learned about protecting the environment,” George says. “And they’ve put a lot of thought into how best to improve individuals’ health, reduce air pollution and build a sense of community.”

So come out to show your support for the Breathe Project, these fantastic students and the Buccos this Friday. Click here for tickets and more information about what promises to be a wonderful night at PNC Park. Let’s knock one out of the park for clean air in Pittsburgh!

Each week it seems the scientific case continues to build about the public health dangers of air pollution, underscoring in real life-and-death terms why we are doing what we are doing at the Breathe Project. The drumbeat is growing louder and louder, and in the past month alone, researchers have shown that:

=Prenatal exposure to air pollution is linked to childhood obesity. A study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that women in New York City exposed to higher concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, were more than twice as likely to have children who were obese by age seven compared with women with lower levels of exposure. PAHs are common urban pollutants released by the burning of coal, diesel, oil and gas.

=Emissions from cars, trucks, planes and power plants cause 13,000 premature deaths in the United Kingdom each year—more than from car accidents. The study published by MIT researchers in the journal Environmental Science and Technology found that of the various sources of emissions in the UK, car and truck exhaust was the single greatest contributor to premature death in 2005 (the most recent year for which data were available).

=Long-term exposure to air pollution increases risk of hospitalization for lung and heart disease. A PLoS ONE study by researchers at Harvard School of Public Health was the first to look at the link between the long-term effects of exposure to fine particles and rates of hospital admissions. It found that long-term rates of admissions for pneumonia, heart attack, stroke and diabetes are higher in locations with higher long-term average particle concentrations.

Today, science again reminds us of the vital need for clean air for the health of our families and communities. A study published in the May 16 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association—the most widely circulated medical journal in the world—reports that even a short-term reduction in air pollution exposure can improve your cardiovascular health. To draw this conclusion, the researchers used the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing as their test laboratory.

To protect the health of athletes and spectators during the Olympics, China took major steps to improve air quality in Beijing, which is one of the most polluted cities in the world. The Chinese government spent $17 billion on environmental cleanup, shutting down factories, halting construction project, spraying roads with water to reduce dust and limiting car traffic in the weeks leading up to the Games and throughout the event.

That gave researchers a unique opportunity to compare the health effects of pollution exposure before and after the Games—when pollution levels were high—and during the Olympics, when levels were much lower. “We wanted to take advantage of such a huge intervention and look at what happens to people biologically,” says senior author Junfeng Zhang, a professor of environmental and global health at the University of Southern California.

Zhang and his colleagues studied 125 healthy, young medical residents, testing them twice before the air pollution controls were put in place, twice while the controls were being implemented and twice after the games had ended. Specifically, they measured blood pressure and looked for blood markers linked to clotting and inflammation, known risk factors for heart disease.

They found decreased levels of these biomarkers with reductions in certain air pollutants during the Olympics. After the Games ended, both air pollution and these biomarkers rose to pre-Olympic levels. That suggests high air pollution levels can affect young and healthy hearts in a matter of just a few weeks.

“We believe this is the first major study to clearly demonstrate that changes in air pollution exposure affect cardiovascular disease mechanisms in healthy, young people,” Zhang says.

And what goes for China goes for Pittsburgh, too. In an accompanying editorial to the study, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health report that Asian emissions may account for as much as 20 percent of ground-level pollution in the United States. “It is in the common interest to maintain air quality for the promotion of global health,” they write.

We couldn’t agree more. To find out what you can do to improve the air quality in Pittsburgh and beyond, click here and pledge to take action TODAY for clean air. Your life may just depend on it.

Trust us. We know firsthand that spreading the word about the need to take action for clean air in Pittsburgh isn’t easy. The concepts can be highly scientific, and the air pollution problem is largely invisible to the eye, making it harder to show people why they should care. These challenges become even greater when the audience you are trying to reach speaks a different language.

A student team at Chatham University in Squirrel Hill recently took a step toward bridging the communications gap when it comes to raising awareness about air quality issues in Pittsburgh by developing a bilingual clean-air brochure. The project was part of an undergraduate advertising course taught this past spring by Melanie Oates, an assistant professor of business. Oates charged her class with developing promotional projects for the university’s Rachel Carson Institute, a Breathe Project coalition member working to continue the legacy of Chatham’s most famous alumna, author and scientist Rachel Carson.

One group of students decided to try to reach Pittsburgh’s Spanish-speaking population with the clean air message of the Rachel Carson Institute. It’s a message that hits very close to home for Nina Demeter, 22, a senior from Bridgeport, Conn., who was part of the bilingual brochure team. “I’ve had terrible asthma ever since coming here,” Demeter says. “I wheeze on an everyday basis, even just when I start laughing.”

Chatham University students Andrea Mieses, Nina Demeter, Anne Marie Brnardic and Elisabeth Henriques (left to right) have created a Spanish-English brochure about Pittsburgh's air quality to reach the region's Latino population

Her teammate Andrea Mieses, 25, of Mt. Lebanon, says whenever she travels to see family in Venezuela and then returns to Pittsburgh, she has difficulty breathing and her allergies are exacerbated. “I always knew something was going on with this city,” she says.

Demeter, Mieses and their classmates Elisabeth Henriques, 21, of Long Island, New York and Anne Marie Brnardic, 20, of West Deer first did extensive research about air quality in Pittsburgh to find out what that “something” might be. “All of us knew there was an air pollution problem here in Pittsburgh, but this project really opened our eyes,” Henriques says. “A lot of the facts I learned really shocked me.”

The students then wrote a Spanish-English brochure to share the knowledge they gained in both languages. The brochure is called “Breathe Easier in Allegheny County”—or “Respite mas facil en Allegheny County!” It talks about how combatting air pollution (contaminacion atmosferica) is vital to the health of our community and the future of Pittsburgh’s economy.

The goal, they say, is to reach Pittsburgh’s Latino population with facts about how air pollution is harmful to human health and ways for people to safeguard their families. “This knowledge isn’t always communicated in Spanish,” Mieses explains. “So it doesn’t reach a lot of people most affected by air pollution.”

While their class ended this spring, the four women plan to continue to raise awareness about air quality in Pittsburgh and taking steps in their own lives to clean our air. Mieses says, “The fact that our little brochure is getting so much attention shows what an important problem this is here.”

May is World Asthma Month, and to commemorate this occasion, Allegheny General Hospital and the Breathe Project are presenting a summit on asthma and the environment to raise awareness about asthma problems in the Pittsburgh region. Air pollution is a major factor that affects asthma, along with other environmental triggers, and southwestern Pennsylvania has one of the highest asthma rates in the state.

At the regional summit on May 16, a panel of medical experts and researchers will discuss the air quality problems in our region and the effect they have on our health, including sessions about:

= Environmental triggers, impact and prevalence of asthma in our community

= The importance of air pollution as an asthma trigger in our region

= The national and international impact of air pollution on asthma

Click here for program highlights and information about the line-up of renowned panelists from Pittsburgh and across the country, including featured speaker George D. Thurston, professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine at the New York University Institute of Environmental Medicine.

The summit also will include a session on the impact of community moderated by WQED’s Chris Moore, featuring Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette health and environment writers Don Hopey and David Templeton and Linda Lane, superintendent of Pittsburgh Public Schools.

The event is being presented for the medical community and general public through the generous support of The Heinz Endowments and the Suburban Health Foundation. This conference is approved for AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™.

At today’s Allegheny County Board of Health meeting, Ben Avon resident Ted Popovich emptied a bag overflowing with surgical masks onto the conference table at the Clack Health Center in Lawrenceville.

Ted Popovich of Ben Avon delivers 800 surgical masks to voice support for stronger Air Toxic Guidelines in Allegheny County

It was a symbolic gesture of the strong support that exists in the county for the board to enact tougher Air Toxic Guidelines. Each mask–all 800 of them–bore the name of a county resident who signed a petition calling for these regulations to be strengthened.

“I’m nominating myself as a poster boy,” said Popovich, who lives downwind from the heavily industrialized Neville Island. “Since moving back here five years ago, I’ve been diagnosed with environmental allergies and asthma–never had it before–and this past week I was diagnosed with moderate to severe ischemia, or blockage of the arteries…which research says can result from exposure to fine particle pollution.”

When a business in Allegheny County wants to build a facility that will emit toxic chemicals into the air we breathe, they must first get a permit from the Allegheny County Health Department (ACHD). The ACHD has a set of rules it uses to decide whether to grant these permits to protect the public health of country residents. These rules—or Air Toxic Guidelines—were written in 1988, and they are based on science that is even older.

We have learned a lot about toxic chemicals in the last 30 years—and none of it is any good, according to Tom Hoffman, Western Pennsylvania Director of Clean Water Action. “The more we know about the effects of these toxic chemicals on humans, the worse we know they are for us,” Hoffman says.

The ACHD has been trying to update the air toxic guidelines for more than five years. In 2009, a committee of environmentalists, academics, community leaders and industry representatives presented updated guidelines to the Board of Health that had been several years in the making. That attempt failed for political reasons, and a new 20-member committee has been trying to reach a consensus since January 2010.

Popovich and environmental groups like Clean Water Action and Group Against Smog and Pollution (GASP) are calling for Air Toxic Guidelines that include:

= An updated list of toxic chemicals released in the county and the latest scientific knowledge about the effects of these chemicals;

= A recognition of the effects of other pollution sources nearby the proposed facility that is seeking a permit;

= A recognition that some parts of the county have borne more than their share of the effects of toxic pollution—Clairton and Avalon are two main examples; and

= Some process that would incentivize reductions in the total amount of toxic pollution in the county.

Rachel Filippini, executive director of GASP, told the health department board today about the importance of considering the cumulative effects of pollution sources when voting on the revised guidelines.

“Once you have a copy of the Air Toxic Guidelines, we ask that you review it carefully and not settle for an Air Toxic Guidelines that does not take cumulative impact from multiple sources into account,” she said. “Human bodies don’t discriminate when they take pollution in. We are affected by cumulative pollution and so should be regulated as such.”

Not being able to reach a consensus on the new guidelines in time for today’s meeting–especially the provision to consider the cumulative impact from existing sources–means at least two more months will pass in which permits will be issued using the out-of-date rules, environmental groups worry.

Dr. Donald Burke, dean of the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh, is the chair of the committee revising the Air Toxic Guidelines. He said his group will be meeting again soon and “hopefully one of these days can come to closure.”

The next Board of Health meeting will take place on July 11. Meantime, you can click here if you are interested in adding your name to the online petition being circulated by a network of local environmental groups calling for stronger Air Toxic Guidelines in Allegheny County.