This Tree Kills Cockroaches

The problem with using “the latest scientific data” to guide public policy comes when assumptions might have been faulty to begin with. Over and over during the mayor’s big push to plant hundreds of thousands of trees across the city it was claimed that trees “reduce the pollutants that trigger asthma attacks and exacerbate other respiratory diseases” (which is actually a little more modest than how they tended to sell it in the past). Then some initial studies showed that cockroaches may be to blame. Now there’s further research with similar conclusions:

[A] new study by Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health [. . .] finds that higher exposure to cockroach dust may explain why some New York City children have asthma while others, who grow up just blocks away, do not.

. . .

Other studies have shown a link between cockroach exposure and asthma. But the Columbia study, published online in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, is the first to show that children in high-asthma neighborhoods have been more exposed to cockroaches than those in adjacent low-asthma neighborhoods, Matthew Perzanowski, senior author of the study, said Tuesday.

The study may help explain, he said, why the prevalence of asthma among children entering school varies greatly by neighborhood, from 3 percent in Flushing, Queens, to almost 19 percent, in East Harlem.