Do counties with worse measured air also show higher infant mortality?
Grouping monitored counties into quartiles of day-weighted mean AQI, what is the published all-cause infant mortality rate in each quartile?
What this study shows
Published infant mortality rates summarised by air-quality quartile, with the number of counties and the combined denominator behind each group.
What it cannot show
This is an ecological comparison of areas, not of people. It cannot show that air quality caused any outcome, and it is not adjusted for social, economic or clinical differences between counties.
Computing this study from released data…
Sources
- EPA AirData daily AQI by county (air_quality_months)
- Released county health values in the Atlas (v_health_metrics_public)
Association is not causation: co-occurrence in the same county does not show that any exposure caused any outcome.
Definitions, suppression rules and reproducibility are documented in Methods.