Car use linked to heart attacks in Hamilton
August 6, 2006

City councillors were told last week that vehicle use may help explain why Hamiltonians have 30 percent more heart problems than people in similar communities. At a minimum, a local air pollution study suggests drivers and passengers in cars, as well as people walking, cycling and living along major roads, are exposed to very high levels of air pollution.

Dr Denis Corr presented the results of a mobile monitoring study conducted last year for Clean Air Hamilton and environment ministries at the federal and provincial level. Moving back and forth across the city, the monitoring van's instruments measured pollutants in residential areas, near schools, along major roads and at intersections.

Moving back and forth across the city, the monitoring van's instruments measured pollutants in residential areas, near schools, along major roads and at intersections.

"If you walk out your front door in the morning, the levels are usually relatively low", Corr told the councillors. "But the peak one minute averages when you go on a four-lane arterial road can be twenty times higher, and when you sit at the traffic lights, with all those cars idling around you, it can be as much as fifty times higher in terms of the peak numbers."

Corr, a McMaster professor who worked for many years for the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, had presented the study to council's planning committee in January, and was asked to come back and speak to all the councillors at a committee of the whole meeting. However, five councillors missed Wednesday's assembly and quorum was lost repeatedly during citizen presentations on climate change in the last half of the meeting. The missing councillors were Terry Whitehead, Bill Kelly, Dave Mitchell, Art Samson and Chad Collins.

While much of Corr's presentation repeated the earlier one, last week's added new material, including the startling results of a high school student's research that was won him a place at the Canadian science fair finals.

Sixteen year old Jordan Bowman used a monitor to measure levels of carbon monoxide inside a number of vehicles as they were used to commute to Toronto, drive around Hamilton all day, or just to get to a job here in the city. The drivers then underwent a blood test to see how the exposures were affecting their cardio-respiratory health.

"He found a very high correlation between commuting all the way to Toronto and the CO levels and the carboxyhemoglobin levels in people's blood," said Corr. "Next lowest was people who drove around Hamilton, and the lowest was people who commuted inside Hamilton."

The binding of carbon monoxide to red blood cells to form carboxyhemoglobin blocks the essential function of those cells in delivering oxygen to the body.

Corr linked Bowman's experiment to a recent German health study that reported heart attack victims arriving in hospital were twice as likely to have been in traffic just prior to suffering the attack. Earlier studies, including one done in Hamilton, have found that people living within 50 metres of a major road suffer an average reduction in their lifespan of two years.

Corr pointed out that heart issues are the main health effects of air pollution, not breathing problems. "Most people think - and it's intuitive - that the impacts of air pollution will be on the respiratory system, but actually there's about three times as many heart attacks due to air pollution as there are respiratory incidents."

And the victims are not just the elderly or people who are already ill. "That's just not true," declared Corr. "It can be people who don't even know they have a cardiac problem."

Downtown councillor Bob Bratina suggested that most people "would sort of assume that in the car there's some kind of a filter and just close the window and you're okay." He asked Corr to comment on the health effects of sitting in a highway traffic jam.

"Those noise walls along the QEW stop the noise for the people with their backyards there," replied Corr, "but they concentrate the pollution because it doesn't get blown away."

He suggested the impacts on commuters may provide a clue on why "the levels of cardiac impacts in Hamilton are 30% higher than in equivalent communities." About a third of employed Hamiltonians work outside the city, mainly in the greater Toronto area.

Ward 3 councillor Bernie Morelli, who missed several council meetings earlier in the year due to health problems, took particular interest in Corr's findings. He noted that the medical personnel he has been dealing with say that "they don't know what it is, but there's something going on in Hamilton that's quite different than other communities in the province where they have worked."

Mayor Di Ianni called the monitoring report "productive, well-timed and appreciated". In response to Corr's recommendation for a multi-government effort to reduce air pollution in the city, and a motion to that effect by Ward 4 councillor Sam Merulla, Di Ianni suggested the inclusion of Halton, Niagara and Brant officials. "We may have some peculiar issues," said the mayor, "but we're not atypical from other communities."

Bratina did not agree, stating that his observations during annual trips across the country as the commentator for Tiger-Cat football games found that "no one comes close to what we have here that I've seen". He argued a major problem in Hamilton is lack of enforcement.

"We can't even put the anti-idling bylaw in place because we can't afford the enforcement," Bratina noted. He called on his colleagues to "get serious, and confront this" and take a position that "we're going to have a clean city where quality of life comes first and everything else comes second."

That was echoed later in the meeting by Flamborough councillor Dave Braden who chaired the meeting. Referring to the annual $1.6 million council budget to combat West Nile virus, he questioned " spending all this money for three dead crows and no human deaths" while failing to lead on air quality.

"Here's a threat, that depending upon your math, is 100 to 300 times bigger, a problem that's getting worse by the day," he declared, "and I don't think we're really doing too much".

A transcript of Corr's presentation and the questions by councillors has been posted on the CATCH website at http://www.hamiltoncatch.org/cow/cow_060802a.htm .

It includes a link to the slides used in the presentation at http://www.hamiltoncatch.org/pdfs/Pollutants-Impacting-Survey.pdf.

The full monitoring report is posted on the Clean Air Hamilton website at http://www.cleanair.hamilton.ca/reports/reports-news-presentations-fact-sheets.asp.

Above photos and graph are from Dr. Denis Corr's presentation.