Cancer Burden: How close can you live to a highway?

My husband and I have moved twice in the last two years.  Both times our housing searches included ruling out apartments and houses in close proximity to a highway.  My man is an environmental attorney who enforces and defends the Clean Air Act.  He knows a lot about environmental carcinogens and together we have figured out how to make  logical choices about potential environmental harms. Numerous studies show a connection between highway pollution and cardiac disease, pulmonary disease, childhood leukemia, and lung cancer.  Benzine, butadine, and particle-bound polycyclic aromatic carbons are some of the carcinogens emitted by vehicles.  Diesel soot is particularly carcinogenic and people who live near freeways are exposed 25 times more to soot particulate pollution. The recommendation commonly issued by environmental policy organizations is to not live within 200 meters of a highway.  (200 meters equals 656 feet, or 218 yards, which is the equivalent of two football fields.)  This can get confusing because our country is dominated by highways – even small, two-lane rural routes are sometimes called highways.  Studies I have read, such as one from the Sierra Club, suggest the greatest health risks are posed by highways in urban areas with dense population and industry.  One study sited the danger threshold as a highway that has 20,000 cars per day.  To put that number into perspective, the largest bottleneck areas in the country (interstate exchanges in cit...
Source: Everything Changes - Category: Cancer Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs