Decades of Pollution. One City’s Mystery.
Sarah Chambliss, Ph.D., & Elizabeth Mueller, Ph.D.
Kids in Travis County are hospitalized for asthma much more than others in the U.S., a burden that’s unequally distributed across the county.
Is there something different in the air in Austin, Texas — and can these health disparities be stopped? A cross-disciplinary team at The University of Texas at Austin is on a mission to find out.
Recent findings out of UT’s Center for Health and Environment: Education and Research revealed that kids in Travis County go to the hospital for asthma 60% more than others in the country, a burden mostly shouldered by Black and Latino/a/x children.
It’s a health problem that can’t be tackled by health professionals alone: Faced with decades of city planning decisions contributing to air quality issues for certain neighborhoods, experts across the University are working to pinpoint the precise causes of air pollutants impacting Austin kids’ health.
Partnerships
- Dell Medical School
- School of Architecture
And, funded by the National Institutes of Health, their project may have implications for the health of vulnerable communities across the state: As the team continues to characterize sources of Austin air pollution, they’ll compare that to demographic data in other cities across Texas to determine if the problem is hyperlocal, or if their findings can be predictive of asthma severity for children statewide, too.
“The ‘big bad’ air pollutant that gets the most attention and federal regulation is fine particulate matter called PM2.5,” says Sarah Chambliss, Ph.D., a civil engineer and a research associate in Dell Medical School’s Department of Population Health. “It’s easy to look at that alone, or focus only on common sources of pollution like vehicle exhaust. What we’ve found so far, though, is that while the presence of PM2.5 is associated with a general asthma burden, what is actually correlated to the disparity felt by certain populations here is the existence of pollutants that can come from industrial operations — manufacturing, quarries, things like that — that most big studies have overlooked.”
Looking Ahead: Predicting & Mitigating Risk
City plans and zoning have facilitated the distribution of air pollution sources over decades. That’s where Elizabeth Mueller, Ph.D. comes in.
Mueller, a professor in the School of Architecture, is studying how land use and population changes over the years overlap with air pollutant data. The goal: Based on an area’s zoning history, develop a risk index for having certain air pollutant types present in one’s neighborhood — a puzzle that sounds simpler than it is, largely due to decades of piecemeal changes to the city’s land code alongside explosive population and industry growth.
“A key function of zoning is to separate environmental hazards and places where people live,” Mueller says. “But history shows we more often protected wealthier, whiter areas and left others exposed to harm. With the current focus on building as much housing as possible, and to build it anywhere we can, we need to avoid making the same mistakes. We need to avoid putting even more people in harm’s way.”