Every year, the American Lung Association releases its state of the air report.

This year, Louisville's air quality has gotten worse.

The Derby City ranks 22nd for having the most polluted ozone, up seven spots from last year.

The Lung Association and University of Louisville break down this report and its health implications.

In tonight's medical news, we now rank 22nd worst in the nation with an S grade for our level of ozone pollution here in Louisville.

Ozone pollution is often thought of as smog, and it's created by the combination of extreme heat, sunlight, and certain emissions like vehicle emissions and factory emissions.

It's really Louisville's overall environment that contributes to bad air quality.

So it's a combination of geography.

So where we sit, we sit in the Ohio Valley.

When you think of valleys as a basin, right.

And everything blows down and gets stuck.

We don't have a lot of tree canopy.

So those trees can't filter the pollution, and they also can't buffer the heat.

So the more pavement you have, the hotter it runs, which we just talked about accelerates ozone.

Unfortunately, this year's state of the year report and those that have come before in recent years report worse ozone and and mixed results for particle pollution.

And this is partly due to, the negative forces of hotter, drier conditions caused by climate change.

Dirty air is just dangerous to public health.

It causes people to suffer both those there's more immediate and then longer term and even and potentially fatal medical problems, including heart attacks and strokes.

And I mentioned asthma.

Things of that nature.

What we study here, a lot, and what other people kind of sometimes forget is that it's these lower levels over a long, long term that can lead to a lot more chronic diseases.

So we're talking about heart attacks.

We're talking about stroke.

We're talking about diabetes.

We're talking about premature death.

And those don't take those huge, huge high levels.

It's just, you know, it's longer decades and years of exposure over time that increase your risk for those.

There's a clinician I can't give a pill to someone, and take away the effects of air pollution, right?

There is no treatment.

This really requires participation from everyone.

Right.

And so we have to think about no idle zones.

We have to think about the choices we make.

Health systems can be involved.

Policymakers and the public, we can take advantage of things like light colored roofs and porous pavements and more green spaces to reduce that urban heat that interacts with emissions to create ozone, and that those things help to improve environmental health.

And then we also have the ability to interact with their local governments and encourage them to choose zero emission vehicles for their fleets and ensure that we have access to charging stations, and then get our electricity from cleaner sources generally.

I think a lot of people think of cleaner air as just an environmental policy, but really I've started to think of it as preventive medicine.

And I would really like that idea.

To get out there like this isn't an environmental policy.

This is really preventive medicine for everyone.

Now here's reaction from Congressman Morgan McGarvey, who represents Louisville and Washington.

And he says, quote, this is unacceptable.

And it's only going to get worse as the Trump administration keeps rolling back clean air protections.

Every civilian deserves safe, safe, clean air.

We have to hold polluters accountable for poisoning our air.

End quote.