The hidden costs of environmental contamination

Abstract

Cost is an inevitable, but often overlooked and uncounted, consequence of environmental contamination. Any degradation of the environment, whether it is contamination of air or water, pollution of landfills by toxic waste or exposure of children to hazardous chemicals, carries costs. Among these costs are: 1) direct medical expenses for persons made ill by toxic exposures; 2) indirect health-related costs such as time lost from school or work, costs of rehabilitation and costs of special education; 3) diminished economic productivity in persons whose brains, lungs or other organ systems are permanently damaged by toxic exposures; 4) loss of irreplaceable environmental treasures such as the Everglades or the Black Forest; and 5) the costs of environmental clean-up. A methodology for estimating the costs of diseases caused by environmental contamination was developed in the US in the early 1980s by an expert committee convened by the Institute of Medicine and chaired by Stanford University's Nobel Laureate in Economics, Prof. K. Arrow [1]. The core of this methodology is the calculation of the “fractional contribution” of the environment to causation of a particular disease in a particular population. This environmentally attributable fraction (EAF) is defined as: “the percentage of a particular disease category that would be eliminated if environmental risk factors were reduced to their lowest feasible levels” [2]. The EAF for a particular disease, such as childhood asthma, may be converted to an estimate of the cost of that disease in a particular population using the following equation:![Formula][1] Costs are traditionally divided into direct and indirect health-related costs, and both are included in the calculation. The EAF model has now been used in a series of important cases to assess the costs of environmental and occupational disease. Findings from these analyses have had powerful impacts on the health … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif