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For a new link, to the Community Assessment of Freeway Exposure and Health. Doug Brugge, of Tufts University School of Medicine, is the PI for this 5-year community based participatory research study of the health effects of air pollution from major highways. (YT has a little piece of it, having to do with how culture and ethnicity are related to people's perceptions of environmental risks.)

It's a scandal that you probably don't know this, but the ultrafine hydrocarbon particles that condense out of motor vehicle exhaust are very damaging to your health -- and not just your lungs, but your cardiovascular system as well. These are particles less than 2.5 microns in diameter, that can pass through the lungs into the bloodstream. They disappear with a few hundred yards of the road, but near major highways, there can be very high concentrations -- and people live there, work there, sometimes there are parks there. Next to the highway is a very popular place to put public housing developments. There are other pollutants from motor vehicle exhaust as well, of course, that you don't want to be breathing either, but this appears to be about the worst.

We'll be monitoring the air at very specific locations -- which most studies of this problem don't do, they generally look at broad areas such as census tracts -- and sampling people who live near the highway, and elsewhere in the city, asking them about their health, where they spend their time so we can get a good estimate of their exposure, and even taking blood samples and other physical measurements from people so we can understand more about how this kind of pollution causes disease. It will be a while before we have any results, but this is one of the ways in which your tax dollars get invested in public health research. It would never happen if the federal government didn't pay for it, so keep that in mind when you go to the teabag party.