Breathing is Fundamental

The new BMJ has a lot to say about air pollution, starting with this editorial. Everything they say about the UK applies to the US, if not more so. Nowadays the most important source of exposure to polluted air in the industrialized countries is motor vehicle exhaust. Two components, ultrafine particles and oxides of nitrogen, cause the most damage to human health. Ultrafine particles are less than 2.5 microns in diameter -- microscopic, invisible, and odorless. They are in highest concentration near highways, which also happens to be where the nearby residents are likely to be low income people. A favorite place to site low income housing is next to highways.

As the BMJ editorial says, air pollution is the world's fourth leading cause of death. We had mass hysteria over the Ebola outbreak that killed fewer than 12,000 people in West Africa and precisely nobody in the United States; while almost nobody seems to care about air pollution to which about 40,000 annual deaths are attributable in the UK and something like 200,000 in the U.S. Now, this is a little bit misleading in that everybody dies. Attributing these deaths to air pollution means that they are accelerated, the person dies earlier than they would have if they hadn't been exposed. So the years of life lost is not as great as, say, motor vehicle crashes that affect many young people. Still, it's a way of looking at the problem that gives us a sense of its magnitude.

There is also disability associated with air pollution and it has deleterious effects on fetuses and children's development. As the linked essays states, "Although we are familiar with the effects of summer and winter pollution episodes on asthma, pneumonia in older people, strokes, and heart attacks, the wider effects of air pollution are less known. Chronic exposure impairs lung growth of the fetus and throughout childhood, increasing the risk of developing asthma and contributing to impaired cognition, type 2 diabetes, various cancers, and skin ageing and even serving as a risk factor for obesity."

Since the same exhaust pipes and smokestacks that spew out these toxins also spew CO2, which is changing the climate and destroying the oceans, we probably ought to do something about it. Instead, we are now furiously "de-regulating," because the Koch brothers want to continue to murder you for profit and the president works for them.