High traffic roads and adverse birth outcomes: comparing births upwind and downwind of the same road
Andrew Larkin, Mary D Willis, Lena Harris, Beate Ritz, Elaine L Hill, Perry Hystad · 2024
Read High traffic roads and adverse birth outcomes: comparing births upwind and downwind of the same road by Andrew Larkin, Mary D Willis, Lena Harris, Beate Ritz, Elaine L Hill, Perry Hystad (2024) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-11637513.txt.
Description
Andrew Larkin and co-authors use in 2024 a clever wind test to gauge how traffic fumes affect birth outcomes. Busy roads cluster in poorer areas, which muddies plain comparisons. Instead, the team compared pregnant people who lived on opposite sides of the same busy Texas road, one group mostly downwind of the fumes and one mostly upwind.
Across more than thirty-seven thousand matched pairs, babies born at term to downwind mothers weighed a bit less on average. Living very close downwind showed stronger links, with lower weight and higher odds of very early birth. No links appeared for early birth overall. The steep fall with distance points at traffic fumes themselves.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Andrew Larkin, Mary D Willis, Lena Harris, Beate Ritz, Elaine L Hill, Perry Hystad |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2024 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 36 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |