Enacting toxicity: epidemiology and the study of air pollution for public health

Abstract

This paper presents air pollution as a ‘post-human’ public health phenomenon. It draws on an ethnography of a multidisciplinary research project called Weather Health and Air Pollution to explore the material ways in which air pollution challenged scientists’ conceptualisations of harm and health. The epidemiologists on WHAP used statistical techniques to correlate data of air pollution concentrations with mortality and morbidity data collected by hospitals in order to establish a quantified measure of the health effects of exposure to air pollution. Initially, these correlations were problematic: plotted data points failed to map over temporal patterns. A series of negotiations followed. As a result of these, the concept of ‘season’ emerged as a temporal figure through which the very existence and meaning of air pollution was put to the test. Indeed, attempts by researchers to hold stable the notion of toxicity signalled the problem of trying to assess the bodily response to a polluted environment that has supposedly ‘already been’. The paper concludes by arguing how contemplating health through the lens of the material dimensions of time allows public health to: first, view health problems as constituted through bodies and environments, rather than as a relation separating the two; and second, open up indeterminacies and uncertainties as a generative condition of air pollution, and perhaps public health more generally.

Keywords:

• Epidemiology
• data practices
• air pollution
• material agency
• environmental health
• time

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to researchers on the WHAP project whose patience and support made this research possible. Thanks also to Judy Green and Simon Cohn for guidance during the PhD on which this work is based, and to Rebecca Lynch, Simon Cohn and the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and productive comments on earlier versions of this paper. Ethical approval was granted by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Ethics Committee.

Notes

1. All names are psuedonyms.

2. The WHAP project was considered novel by team members in its bringing together and linking of environmental data with health data.

3. Time-series data are data collected on the same observational unit at multiple time periods. In time-series regression analysis, variations in exposure status are compared with changes in health outcomes in a given area.

4. Nitrogen dioxide (NO₂₎ is a key pollutant of concern because of its inflammatory effects on the respiratory system. Both NO₂ and O₃ are intimately linked through atmospheric chemistry and continuously interchange over very short timescales (Williams, Atkinson, Anderson, & Kelly, 2014).

5. Thank you to one of the anonymous reviewers for this insight.