To live and die in L.A. - the health effects of smog

Factual Questions
1

Is somebody living in Los Angeles all their life more likely to develop health complications and/or die prematurely as a result of breathing all of that yucky smog day after day?

I mean, as a opposed to person such as myself, breathing the relatively clean, fresh air of rural northern Michigan?

It seems like a relatively simple question, with what one would surmise would be an easy, obvious answer. But not from what I’ve been able to find on the Internet, however.

This remarkably concise site by the California Air Resources Board outlines past and present scientific studies of the health effects of air pollution, and conclusions of those studies that are completed.

It’s remarkable to me about just how little is known on this subject.

First off, it seems to me that earlier scientific studies were too narrowly focused on particular air pollution elements - ozone, nitric acid, etc. - and not on exposure to all the elements of smog as a whole on a continual basis.

There are numerous studies under way right now, with no conclusions yet, that are the ones that I would have thought would have been looked at many years or decades ago. (The ones at the top of the web page.) Why weren’t they?

One of the few, direct, “this is provably bad” study findings I see at the site is from a 1990 Loma Linda University study, " INCIDENCE OF RESPIRATORY SYMPTOMS AND CHRONIC DISEASES IN A NON-SMOKING POPULATION AS A FUNCTION OF LONG-TERM CUMULATIVE EXPOSURE TO AMBIENT AIR POLLUTANTS."

That study concluded:

Without making this already too-long and probably boring post longer, there are several other studies also listed in which the findings were inconclusive, or flat-out didn’t correspond with the health-risk hypothesis.

So, what’s up? Why don’t scientists have a better handle on this? Do smog breathers die younger from breathing a lifetime of that air pollution?

2

I think it’s pretty difficult to figure out just what deleterious effects smog has had on people in Southern California.

Different people are affected differently. Some people are outside more than others. Some people live in smoggier areas than others (the inland valleys have far more pollution than the coastal areas).

So I don’t know how you would establish a control group to study the effects of the smog. Do you isolate several thousand people for their entire lives in the San Gabriel Valley and tell them to breathe deeply a lot and compare to some supposedly cleaner air in Michigan?

Obviously, the Air Quality Management District (the organization responsible for measuring air pollution in most of Southern California and for adminstering many of the regulations that attempt to control it in conjunction with the State Air Resources Board), is concerned about the health effects. But you can’t just point to one particular pollutant and say “That’s going to take X number of years off of person Y’s life”.

I would also point out that Southern California’s air quality has increased substantially in the past 20 years. First stage smog alerts are very rare and second stage alerts (which were really bad) haven’t occured for many years. I believe that L.A. is no longer the ozone capital of the U.S., losing that title to Houston.