Het milieu en uw geluk en uw gezondheid*
Uit twee studie blijkt dat het leven in een omgeving met veel bomen en weinig luchtvervuiling belangrijk is voor een goede gezondheid.
Uit een Amerikaanse analyse van 18 jaar onder 15 staten in de VS blijkt dat als gevolg van het massaal verdwijnen van bomen aanzienlijk meer mensen doodgaan aan hart- en vaatziektes en ademhalingsproblemen. De
laatste decennia heeft de prachtkever al bijna 100 miljoen bomen aangetast en
gedood. In vergelijking met staten waar deze kever nog niet toegeslagen heeft zijn er 15.000 men meer dood te gegaan aan hart- en vaatziektes en 6.000 aan longproblemen.
In de tweede Canadese studie uitgevoerd in Europa lijkt het dat de hoeveelheid luchtvervuiling het
geluksgevoel van de mensen kan beïnvloeden. Weinig luchtvervuiling zou voor meer geluk
zorgen.
Tree and Human Health May Be Linked
Evidence is increasing from multiple scientific fields that exposure to the natural environment can improve human health. In a new study by the U.S. Forest Service, the presence of trees was associated with human health.
For Geoffrey Donovan, a research forester at the Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station, and his colleagues, the loss of 100 million trees in the eastern and midwestern United States was an unprecedented opportunity to study the impact of a major change in the natural environment on human health.
In an analysis of 18 years of data from 1,296 counties in 15 states, researchers found that Americans living in areas infested by the emerald ash borer, a beetle that kills ash trees, suffered from an additional 15,000 deaths from cardiovascular disease and 6,000 more deaths from lower respiratory disease when compared to uninfected areas. When emerald ash borer comes into a community, city streets lined with ash trees become treeless.
The researchers analyzed demographic, human mortality, and forest health data at the county level between 1990 and 2007. The data came from counties in states with at least one confirmed case of the emerald ash borer in 2010. The findings -- which hold true after accounting for the influence of demographic differences, like income, race, and education -- are published in the current issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
" There's a natural tendency to see our findings and conclude that, surely, the higher mortality rates are because of some confounding variable, like income or education, and not the loss of trees," said Donovan. "But we saw the same pattern repeated over and over in counties with very different demographic makeups."
Although the study shows the association between loss of trees and human mortality from cardiovascular and lower respiratory disease, it did not prove a causal link. The reason for the association is yet to be determined.
The emerald ash borer was first discovered near Detroit, Michigan, in 2002. The borer attacks all 22 species of North American ash and kills virtually all of the trees it infests.
The study was conducted in collaboration with David Butry, with the National Institute of Standards and Technology; Yvonne Michael, with Drexel University; and Jeffrey Prestemon, Andrew Liebhold, Demetrios Gatziolis, and Megan Mao, with the Forest Service's Southern, Northern, and Pacific Northwest Research Stations.
Air Pollution and Unhappiness Correlated, Study of Europeans Shows
Researchers in Canada have found a correlation between air pollution and people's happiness. Their deep analysis, reported in the latest issue of the International Journal of Green Economics, suggests that air pollution may lead to unhappiness while the converse is also true, the unhappier the citizens of a country the more air pollution.
Economists at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, have taken an outside view of fourteen European countries to see whether or not there is a causal link between levels of air pollution and the happiness of citizens of those countries. Byron Lew and Mak Arvin explain that their research is not about the determinants of life satisfaction or air pollution but the primary goal is to focus on the causal relationships between these two factors.
The researchers looked at recorded data on pollution levels in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain and the UK. They analysed per capita carbon dioxide emissions as a proxy for overall pollution given that its main source is the burning of fossil fuels and looked for causality using a statistical formula, the Granger causality test, with citizen happiness as determined from survey data.
The findings do not offer a mechanism by which air pollution levels cause unhappiness and vice versa. However, they do suggest that policy changes that encourage less pollution will have a positive effect. "A stronger case can be made for further regulation of the state of the environment in general and air quality in particular," the team says. "Cleaner air will elevate the level of happiness of citizens in Europe and we suspect in other regions around the globe." The researchers add that measures ought to be taken by policy makers to improve their citizens degree of life satisfaction, such as improved healthcare and education, social safety nets for those in the poverty trap and efforts to reduce workplace stress might in turn lead to a reduction in air
pollution. (Januari 2013)
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