Air improvements help toddlers

The Guardian -  Improvements in air pollution are leading to brighter, smarter toddlers, according to a new study from Columbia University in New York….

Over the course of the study, air pollution in central New York improved massively. Clean-air legislation reduced some pollutants from the city’s yellow taxis by as much as 80%. Heavy fuel oils are being phased out for heating the city’s buildings and cleaner fuels are being used in the city’s buses. Fine particle pollution and levels of nitrogen dioxide halved between 1998 and 2016….

The good news is that the toddlers’ scores improved as the air pollution improved. This was especially clear when the children were two and three years old, and during times of sharper falls in air pollution. The researchers were also able to take into account the effects of other factors that may have affected the children’s development. These included rapid declines in the proportion of children who lived with a tobacco smoker, which fell from 34% to 18%, and increases in maternal education, with a nine percentage-point increase in the proportion of mothers who had successfully graduated from high school.