lung doctors is kindled a debate about how harmful diesel exhaust. While some speak of Thousands dead, doubtful other the risk. You require to check limits.
How dangerous is what comes from the exhaust of a diesel vehicle? A bitter dispute among Germany’s leading lung specialists has flared up, with great importance for the ongoing discussion of driving bans. For the former President of the German society for pneumology (DGP), Dieter Köhler, the matter is clear: He holds a majority of the existing studies into the health risks posed by diesel exhaust to be methodologically questionable.
A correlation is still not causality, says Dieter Köhler.
To contradict the previous Position of the current DGP Board. This had carefully in the beginning of December in detail on the health risks associated with nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and the results of the study at the Helmholtz-Institute for environmental medicine. The Munich-based researchers had the Disease burden of the urban population with those of people in the country compared, and weighed the differences of the NO2 emissions of diesel vehicles.
Köhler accuses you of, confounding factors such as lack of exercise or Smoking have not sufficiently taken into account: “for a random correlation, causality, for which there is no justification. On the contrary, You can refute even very good.”
bans disproportionately?
köhler’s criticism have now more than 100 lung specialist doctors and aerosol researchers. You have signed a position paper, the doubts, the health risk due to nitrogen dioxide and a Review of the limits calls.
The current President of the German society for pneumology, Klaus Rabe, admitted to the NDR, the number of critics is far greater than initially assumed. He wants to reach out to the critics in his own organization, and a dispassionate debate on the scientific foundations of the current legal limits allow: “the question as to The limit is debatable, I agree with the critics. Because you just have to say: You do not know, whether he needs to go up or down. 50 micro-grams are correct, or 40? There are 60 or 35? The honestly none of them said exactly.”
Klaus Rabe wants to admit to the critics and a factual debate.
The conflict of the professional Association of lung doctors is of great importance for the ongoing discussion of driving bans for older diesel vehicles. The current limit value of 40 micrograms of NO2 per cubic meter of air in the annual mean will be exceeded in many German cities, a number of administrative courts had imposed thereupon driving bans for Diesel cars.
The critics say the disproportionate. In force of such a prohibition for Diesel came from Euro-Norm 4 last updated on 1. January 2019 for the entire environmental zone in Stuttgart. The head doctor of the pulmonary clinic at the hospital to the Red cross, Martin Hetzel, shares the criticism of Köhler: “There is no particulate matter or NO2-disease of the lungs or of the heart, which can be found in the hospital. There is also not a single dead that would be the result of causal to fine particles or NO2. This is bad science, ideology-driven populism.”