Black children are far more likely than their white counterparts to suffer from asthma, while they also generally have higher blood levels of toxic lead, according to EPA assessments.
And among the Black population as a whole, death comes earlier than for other racial and ethnic groups, apart from American Indians and Alaska natives.
Those gaps are perhaps the most consistent thread running through a newly released EPA compilation of a half-dozen indicators of “environmental health disparities.” Also covering areas such as the incidence of underweight births and hypertension, the data show that Blacks fare worse by those yardsticks as well.
While researchers have linked air pollution in varying degrees to all of those harms, the one relative bright spot comes in a gauge of direct exposure to the fine particles often dubbed soot. More so than any other group, Black people are prone to live in counties where monitoring shows those areas meeting both EPA’s 2012 annual exposure standard for soot and the 2006 daily standard,
