Health-Based Environmental Standards: Balancing Costs with Benefits

From a scientific standpoint, the problem is that no safe level is likely to exist for most, if not all, pollutants. Rather, lower ambient concentrations of a particular pollutant almost always will imply lower risks of an adverse health effect (see Figure 1). In the case of air pollution, even very low levels of pollutants pose some risk of adverse reactions in children and the elderly with chronic respiratory disease.