A recent Israeli study found that asthmatic children's lungs contained chemicals not detected by environmental monitoring stations.
Prof. Elizabeth Fireman, of Tel Aviv University and the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, is one of the world’s experts on pulmonary disease, and her knowledge has been forged in the wreckage of disaster. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Prof. Fireman flew to New York to perform a then-unfamiliar test on firefighters who had developed the chronic, damaging “WTC cough” after working in the rubble.
The test, called “Induced Sputum” or IS, involves administering a dose of hypertonic saline that produces a mucus-like expectorate, which can then be analyzed for its toxic particle content. This method allowed for much easier and less invasive testing of firefighters’ lungs than the alternative, bronchioscopy, which involves inserting a fiber-optic scope into the lungs. Prof. Fireman found that the WTC firefighters had elevated levels of toxic metals like mercury in their lungs, and now she has turned this tool toward the study of an equally vulnerable group — asthmatic children.
She and her team studied the induced sputum of 136 asthmatic children between two and 12 years old in Tel Aviv and compared them to the findings of rooftop pollution stations in the same area. Her findings were concerning — she found that the chemicals found in the children’s lungs didn’t match what the pollution stations were reporting for the same period of time, indicating that the stations were not collecting accurate enough data to determine the physiological effects of air pollution on these children.
“We have found that environmental monitoring is not enough. You need a biomonitoring technique, like IS, which is a more physiologically sensitive,” said Fireman.
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