Nitrogen dioxide poisoning

[Dr Jekyll]

I saw a claim from an anti car group that more people die from NO2 poisoning (the implication was therefore from traffic fumes) than from smoking. As I understood it NO2 poisoning is mainly an occupational hazard for certain types of workers. Does anyone know the full facts?

[W124Bob]

I spent 40 years driving diesel powered trains, most of the stuff I drove in the early years pre 2000ish was pretty dirty. If you were looking for a group to study then older train drivers would be a good place start, particularly those of us that have never smoked.

[rxe]

Gut feel says that none of this is good for you, but the figures are heavily manipulated to suit whoever is arguing. No one "dies of diesel fumes" - they die of heart attacks and COPD (for example). The question is to what extent are diesel fumes responsible. One would assume that living in London would be a marker for such diseases, but the reality is that the incidence of these diseases is often lower in London - for example, the incidence of COPD (diagnosis and death rate) in London is lower than the (equally affluent) South East, and actually under the UK average. But given the claims of 40,000 people a year dying of diesel ..... surely the figures in London would be worse? All very odd.

A lot of this is down to very dubious Linear No Threshold modelling. Essentially this says "if we have 2 data points, we can draw a straight line between them all the way down to negligible levels, and then multiply the death rates up by the total population which gives a big scary number. This is how potential radiation fatalities are modelled, and vast numbers of alleged deaths are postulated. What they are saying is that there is no real evidence that low concentrations of pollutants/radiation/whatever kill you - but our model based on high doses predicts this number.

In the radiation world, anomalies like this;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Mazandaran

...do start to damage LNTs credibility.

[RSTurboPaul]

Isn't the '40000 deaths' line a simplified version of the facts, in that the report actually talks about 'years of life lost', which was converted to 40k deaths to make a snappy and fearmongering headline?

IIRC those 'years of life lost' are usually <6 months at the end of the life of someone who is already ill with something else, so traffic emissions are not making people drop dead in the street.

[Derek Smith]

The deaths from lead poisoning, something that was of concern to me when I was a printer, was very low in theory. The stats backed it up.

Yet we had a high incidence of pernicious anaemia. But then, no one dies of pernicious anaemia. They might be incapacitated due to nerve damage in the legs, they might have other problems, but no one dies of being unable to feel their toes. You might suffer from a form of dementia, but no one dies of that.

Of course, there's stomach cancer, but then how does one know that the cause was pernicious anaemia? It cannot be proven.

So no problem with chronic lead poisoning, the type that printers in the old days had.

In any case, these people tended to die when they were old, so, it seems, their deaths were not worth putting into the stats. I mean, only 6 months of your life lost. No problem, at least, no problem unless it's your life shortened.