Kern County, CA: Death Rate From Chronic Respiratory Disease 12X Statewide Rate, 28X SF County Rate
The fastest driving route to Sacramento from Los Angeles is the I-5 or Highway 99. On the way there, you'll drive through miles of farms, oil fields and open space. After a couple of hours, you'll be in the heart of Kern County and San Joaquin Valley — a place that has become the state's epicenter of harmful air pollution. The state of California has drastically reduced air pollution since the 1970s in its major cities—but an investigation of Chronic Lower Respiratory Disease (CLRD) and air pollution shows Kern County and the rest of San Joaquin Valley still have a long way to go.
In a review of deaths from Chronic Lower Respiratory Disease—which refers to a group of diseases that affect the lungs, cause airflow blockage and breathing-related problems and can be fatal—between 2013 and 2016 from the California Department of Public Health, one county stood out: Kern County, which had more than 23,000 deaths.
About one out of every 37 people in Kern County—current population 871,337—died of CLRD over that time. This is 12 times higher than the death rate from CLRD for California, which is 87,725 deaths in the same years, and 14 times higher than the rate for the U.S., which is 602,465 deaths. Kern County's residents are about 28 times more likely to die from CLRD than people in San Francisco County, which has a similar sized population.
CLRD diseases—which include asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, occupational lung diseases and pulmonary hypertension—are the third leading cause of death in the U.S. More than 11 million Americans were diagnosed in 2015. "Reducing the air pollution in the San Joaquin Valley is far from done," Kevin Hamilton, CEO of Central California Asthma Collaborative, told EHN. "The air district would like to claim 90 percent of air pollution has been cleaned up since 1980, but we only just got better at monitoring air quality within the past 10 years."
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https://www.ehn.org/chronic-respiratory-disease-california-2621765230.html
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