Sociodemographic and geographic variation in mortality attributable to air pollution in the United States

There are large differences in premature mortality in the USA by racial/ethnic, education, rurality, and social vulnerability index groups. Using existing concentration-response functions, particulate matter (PM _2.5 ) air pollution, population estimates at the tract level, and county-level mortality data, we estimated the degree to which these mortality discrepancies can be attributed to differences in exposure and susceptibility to PM _2.5 . We show that differences in mortality attributable to PM _2.5 were consistently more pronounced between racial/ethnic groups than by education, rurality, or social vulnerability index, with the Black American population having by far the highest proportion of deaths attributable to PM _2.5 in all years from 1990 to 2016. Over half of the difference in age-adjusted all-cause mortality between the Black American and non-Hispanic White population was attributable to PM _2.5 in the years 2000 to 2011.