". . . .Concluding that smog is likely to be killing many people, a national panel of experts advised the Environmental Protection Agency to consider the economic value of lost lives when comparing the costs and benefits of setting new air pollution rules.
Ozone, the main ingredient of smog, is a lung-scarring gas created when fumes from vehicles, factories and consumer products react in the sun. Over the last two decades, many scientific studies have shown that on days when ozone or other air pollutants increase, deaths and hospitalizations from respiratory diseases and heart attacks rise.
The Los Angeles Basin has the nation's worst ozone levels.
....the EPA often calculates the lives that could be saved if a new smog rule were adopted, and then attaches a dollar value to each life, currently about $7 million per life.
In the Bush administration, the White House Office of Management and Budget has questioned the reliability of the science linking air pollution to deaths and has instructed the EPA staff to remove ozone mortality benefits when setting some rules.
"The nation's leading scientists have issued a wake-up call to the U.S. government to strengthen the clean-air measures that will prevent the death and disease from smog air pollution," said Dr. John Balbus, chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund."-LAT
