STUDY: HEALTH RISK FROM ETHANOL
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE - A new study out of Stanford says pollution from ethanol could end up creating a worse health hazard than gasoline, especially for people with asthma and other respiratory diseases. "Ethanol is being promoted as a clean and renewable fuel that will reduce global warming and air pollution," Mark Z. Jacobson, the study's author and an atmospheric scientist at Stanford, said in a statement. "But our results show that a high blend of ethanol poses an equal or greater risk to public health than gasoline, which already causes significant health damage."
The study appears in today's online edition of Environmental Science & Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society. It comes at a time when the Bush administration is pushing plans to boost ethanol production and the nation's automakers are required by 2012 to have half their vehicles run on flex fuel, allowing the use of either gasoline or ethanol.
He found that ethanol-burning cars could boost levels of toxic ozone gas in urban areas, but that Los Angeles residents would be by far the hardest hit because of the city's reliance on the automobile and environmental factors that tend to concentrate smog there. His study showed that the city would experience a 9 percent increase in the rate of ozone-related respiratory deaths -- 120 more deaths per year -- compared with what would have been projected in 2020 assuming continued gasoline use.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/18/ETHANOL.TMP