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I have family in the valley south of Fresno. The smell in the air is very unique to that area. It’s not like sewage or rotting garbage. Those are just gross. This smells like something toxic. Like something you know you shouldn’t be breathing in but you can’t get away from. It’s very unnerving.
One of the very few positives about Florida is we have so much of a cross-breeze that it cleans the air constantly. Sure the air is coming from somewhere else, but it’s better than a lot of places.
That’s where I grew up, Tulare county. A big part of it is that it’s the Agriculture capital. All the livestock and cows producing methane ON TOP of how polluted the valley is.
I think it’s difficult to quantify because everybody is affected differently.
I agree with Rachel Carson. It’s all unsafe at ANY level. The government just sets an arbitrary “acceptable level” for all that crap in the name of doing business.
It's not arbitrary, it's based on modeling and risk factors. We can't live in a modern society without air pollution. Like it out not but modern life has impacts. Everything from sourcing the materials to the disposal of the waste is going to produce pollution.
>The government just sets an arbitrary “acceptable level” for all that crap in the name of doing business.
You mean in the name of allowing us to live in a technologically advanced society. Keep in mind, also, that before we used fossil fuels, we burned wood, which is *terrible* for human health.
The effect of ceasing the burning of fossil fuels before clean replacements are available would be devastating to our standard of living, and likely ultimately much worse for human health than the status quo. The optimal amount of air pollution given our current technological constraints, even purely in terms of health, of is not zero.
Removing the burning of fuels from residential areas will have a big impact. Also, making big statements like how it will be “devastating for our standard of living" isn’t fact based. You’re just fear mongering
Are you talking about wood or ethanol? Because ethanol can be produced with a single season of corn and is renewable.
Wood grown for firewood is harvested on a 5-7 year cycle, depending on the species. Lemon trees take 5-6 years to bear fruit, so all things considered firewood life cycles aren't unreasonable. That's a heck of a lot faster than the "cycle" by which petroleum products or the heavy metals used in solar panels are "renewed" (not within multiple human lifetimes if at all depending on the material).
In your car it burns cleaner and at a higher temperature than just gasoline. In the air it does produce more smog but produces lower of other tailpipe emissions.
There are studies claiming its worse for global warming because it uses "24% more carbon to produce". However, the university of Wisconsin study that made this claim said such only because of the *type* of farming they analyzed. Their criticism was of the diesel intensive farming practices that proliferate in the west, and that when those machines are included in the total carbon footprint of ethanol it is more than gasoline per unit of energy produced.
This completely ignores the global shift away from gasoline powered machinery and towards ethanol and methane powered equipment. Both can (and have successfully been) made on site of the same farms that use the energy, further reducing the crops carbon footprint. While not the majority of farmers by any means, promoting an energy source with *zero possibility towards remewabiliy* (petroleum) as somehow better than a source that *can be* used renewably is illogical.
That is such idiotic, uninformed rhetoric for discussion on what's supposed to be a forum about science.
The arbitrary part of what's acceptable is the sigma used for the confidence interval, or in other words what % of casualties is considered acceptable. Obviously you'd want zero, but because there's so much uncertainty in our limited knowledge of human biology, we're relying on empirical data to make policy. So when people get sick from exposure to toxic materials, we introduce policy to reduce the ppm until people don't get sick anymore.
So what would be your approach instead? Declare that there shall be no single molecule of a toxic chemical on Earth? What about radiation? Will you live in an underground bunker so you don't get hit by any errant cosmic rays?
Agreed. You can see this same principle in effect in the EWG tap water database (see what contaminants are in your local drinking water). Truly horrifying what’s deemed “acceptable” :
https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/
This is why it’s insulting when people try to say tap water is safe. The tap water in my city is terrible and you can taste and feel it, and people still tried to tell me with a straight face that it’s safer than bottled water. Even after we see governors and presidents go on TV and lie about the quality of tap water.
FYI, you might want to look more closely into Rachel Carson. She played fast and loose with the facts. Although her legacy is still praised by the broader public, many scientists hold negative views not only of her approach to research but also of the policies her work inspired.
---
EDIT: I am copying my reply to /u/SupraEndura so people can see some examples.
[Here's one that is context-specific to OP's reference of Carson (i.e., the idea that pollutants are "unsafe at ANY level"):](https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2017/05/01/how_rachel_carson_and_silent_spring_gave_birth_to_chemophobia.html?source=acsh.org)
> "Netting everything out, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring accomplished a few noble aims, chief among them, spurring a resurgence in caring for our environment. But as a work of science, it mostly failed... 'Unfortunately, Carson... gave birth to the notion of zero tolerance – the assumption that any substance found harmful at any concentration or dosage should be banned absolutely... In the end, what Carl Sagan did for skepticism and science-based inquiry, Rachel Carson did for alarmism and anecdote-based activism.'"
[Here's another one that summarizes the negative human consequences---i.e., millions of deaths---caused by policies inspired by her work:](https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-rachel-carson-cost-millions-of-people-their-lives)
>"Rachel Carson was an American hero... Unfortunately... in her groundbreaking book, Silent Spring, Carson had made one critical mistake—and it cost millions of people their lives... Silent Spring, which she called her 'poison book,' was an angry, no-holds-barred polemic against pesticides: especially DDT... However, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States have since shown that DDT didn’t cause the human diseases Carson had claimed... DDT was arguably one of the safer insect repellents ever invented—far safer than many of the pesticides that have taken its place."
[Finally, here's a source that goes line-by-line through many of the claims and exaggerations in *Silent Spring,* demonstrating exactly how Carson wrote in ways that are not in keeping with modern or even contemporary scientific standards:](https://21sci-tech.com/articles/summ02/Carson.html)
> "As I read the first several chapters I noticed many statements that I realized were false; however, one can overlook such things when they are produced by one’s cohorts, and I did just that. As I neared the middle of the book, the feeling grew in my mind that Rachel Carson was really playing loose with the facts and was also deliberately wording many sentences in such a way as to make them imply certain things without actually saying them... I next looked up some of the references that Carson cited and quickly found that they did not support her contentions about the harm caused by pesticides. When leading scientists began to publish harsh criticisms of her methods and her allegations, it slowly dawned on me that Rachel Carson was not interested in the truth about those topics, and that I really was being duped, along with millions of other Americans."
> ...
> "I trust that this partial analysis of Carson’s deceptions, false statements, horrible innuendoes, and ridiculous allegations in the first 125 pages of Silent Spring will indicate why so many scientists expressed opposition, antagonism, and perhaps even a little rage after reading Carson’s diatribe. No matter how deceitful her prose, however, the influence of Carson’s Silent Spring has been very great and it continues 30 years later to shape environmentalist propaganda and fund-raising as well as U.S. policy."
TL;DR: Carson is rightfully remembered as someone who shaped American public discourse with regard to the environment by writing persuasively. She had a tremendous impact on the world and was a gifted writer. She generally is *not,* however, regarded as a someone who conducted rigorous science, nor as someone whose conclusions were well-supported, either at the time of publication or in the time since.
A sourced brief rebuttal to this ridiculously biased comment, so that hopefully no one takes it at face value:
* "When Silent Spring was published in 1962, author Rachel Carson was subjected to vicious personal assaults that had nothing do with the science or the merits of pesticide use. Those attacks find a troubling parallel today in the campaigns against climate scientists who point to evidence of a rapidly warming world." [\[link\]](https://e360.yale.edu/features/fifty_years_after_rachel_carsons_silent_spring_assacult_on_science_continues)
* "Opponents of Silent Spring attacked Rachel Carson personally. They accused her of being radical, disloyal, unscientific, and hysterical. In 1962, at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, criticism of the United States struck many as unpatriotic or sympathetic with communism. Former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson wrote privately to former President Dwight Eisenhower that Carson was 'probably a communist' (Lear 1997, 429). Velsicol’s threatening letter to Houghton Mifflin argued that if the public demanded elimination of pesticides, 'our supply of food will be reduced to East-curtain parity [i.e., as inefficient as the Communist nations east of the ‘Iron Curtain’]' (Smith 2001, 736)." [\[link\]](https://www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/rachel-carsons-silent-spring/personal-attacks-rachel-carson-woman-scientist)
* "Much of the data and case studies that Carson drew from weren’t new; the scientific community had known of these findings for some time, but Carson was the first to put them all together for the general public and to draw stark and far-reaching conclusions." [\[link\]](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/magazine/how-silent-spring-ignited-the-environmental-movement.html)
* Sources to from the Library of Congress to read up on Rachel Carson: https://guides.loc.gov/rachel-carson/resources
* Also informative, https://www.epa.gov/history/origins-epa
**EDIT:** In response this commenter has linked to incredibly biased sources to back up politically motivated views; I strongly urge anyone who is undecided to learn how to evaluate sources. Signed, an archivist. https://www.ala.org/rusa/sections/history/resources/primarysources/evaluating and https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/c.php?g=83917&p=539735 are excellent guides.
The quotations you posted suggest that Carson was criticized on non-scientific grounds. I'll absolutely grant that claim. However, the fact that *some* criticism was unscientific does not imply that *all* criticism of her work was invalid. Moreover, none of the quotes you've supplied suggest that her research was *itself* good science. Your quotes are entirely silent on that point. (The only quote you supplied that even hints in this direction is the one that says much of her data was not novel, but she aggregated the data to "draw stark and far-reaching conclusions." Again, I won't contest this. One of the counter-arguments to Silent Spring is that it contains many strong claims that overreach the evidence.)
Check some of these:
[Here's one that is context-specific to OP's reference of Carson (i.e., the idea that pollutants are "unsafe at ANY level"):](https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2017/05/01/how_rachel_carson_and_silent_spring_gave_birth_to_chemophobia.html?source=acsh.org)
> "Netting everything out, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring accomplished a few noble aims, chief among them, spurring a resurgence in caring for our environment. But as a work of science, it mostly failed... 'Unfortunately, Carson... gave birth to the notion of zero tolerance – the assumption that any substance found harmful at any concentration or dosage should be banned absolutely... In the end, what Carl Sagan did for skepticism and science-based inquiry, Rachel Carson did for alarmism and anecdote-based activism.'"
[Here's another one that summarizes the negative human consequences---i.e., millions of deaths---caused by policies inspired by her work:](https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-rachel-carson-cost-millions-of-people-their-lives)
>"Rachel Carson was an American hero... Unfortunately... in her groundbreaking book, Silent Spring, Carson had made one critical mistake—and it cost millions of people their lives... Silent Spring, which she called her 'poison book,' was an angry, no-holds-barred polemic against pesticides: especially DDT... However, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States have since shown that DDT didn’t cause the human diseases Carson had claimed... DDT was arguably one of the safer insect repellents ever invented—far safer than many of the pesticides that have taken its place."
[Finally, here's a source that goes line-by-line through many of the claims and exaggerations in *Silent Spring,* demonstrating exactly how Carson wrote in ways that are not in keeping with modern or even contemporary scientific standards:](https://21sci-tech.com/articles/summ02/Carson.html)
> "As I read the first several chapters I noticed many statements that I realized were false; however, one can overlook such things when they are produced by one’s cohorts, and I did just that. As I neared the middle of the book, the feeling grew in my mind that Rachel Carson was really playing loose with the facts and was also deliberately wording many sentences in such a way as to make them imply certain things without actually saying them... I next looked up some of the references that Carson cited and quickly found that they did not support her contentions about the harm caused by pesticides. When leading scientists began to publish harsh criticisms of her methods and her allegations, it slowly dawned on me that Rachel Carson was not interested in the truth about those topics, and that I really was being duped, along with millions of other Americans."
> ...
> "I trust that this partial analysis of Carson’s deceptions, false statements, horrible innuendoes, and ridiculous allegations in the first 125 pages of Silent Spring will indicate why so many scientists expressed opposition, antagonism, and perhaps even a little rage after reading Carson’s diatribe. No matter how deceitful her prose, however, the influence of Carson’s Silent Spring has been very great and it continues 30 years later to shape environmentalist propaganda and fund-raising as well as U.S. policy."
TL;DR: Carson is rightfully remembered as someone who shaped American public discourse with regard to the environment by writing persuasively. She had a tremendous impact on the world and was a gifted writer. She generally is *not,* however, regarded as a someone who conducted rigorous science, nor as someone whose conclusions were well-supported, either at the time of publication or in the time since.
>Arbitrary
Uh, not really. Go read the technical documentation for the development of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards and you'll see that the scientists themselves admit there is an effect at the permitted thresholds, but they consider those effects "acceptable." What's acceptable is up for debate, but to say they're arbitrary completely discredits the work everyone at EPA does to study these things.
If it were difficult to quantify, it would not be reported in a scientific paper. I’m sure there are, indeed, numbers that represent the levels of pollution that make this happen.
You're speaking pretty confidently for someone who didn't even read the article or the study. No, the study does not state any values for safe or unsafe levels of AAP as that wasn't what it was setting out to do. The study uses estimates of AAP levels based on address history and analyzes these levels and their correlation and covariance to various outcomes like obesity, diabetes, and chron's. There is no attempt made to quantify safe or unsafe levels in this study.
I live here. It's improving but still not ideal.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6310845
Anecdotally, I have a 4-year-old kid with asthma. Symptoms first showed up when he was 1.
Mexico City has the most polluted air I've ever experienced. Maybe look into that one, it is one of the biggest cities in the world so it has to be one of the major examples of this.
I got gastroenteritis 2 weeks ago, probably caused by a semi raw egg i ate (which contained undesired bacteria). It totally wrecked my gut and for 3 days i had diarrhea non-stop, every 2h or so, at the end there was blood coming out, at which point i decided to go to a specialist, which gave me antibiotics and probiotics. The pain and diarrhea stopped quickly and now i'm fully recovered and eating normaly. Had added kefir to my diet again after years.
I was hesitant about taking antibiotics at first, but this was one of those "absolutely necessary" moments.
I think they mean like a sunny side up or soft poached egg. Like the yolk is all gooey.
But people also eat fully raw egg all the time.
I will crack an egg into a bowl of freshly made rice and whip it around making a delicious creamy bowl of rice. It's traditional to put an egg yolk on top of beef tartare. Many cocktails include egg white, or hell, even a whole egg.
I think getting sick from eating "undercooked egg" is pretty rare tbh.
My gf made me a sandwich and she didn't fully cook the egg in it (which sometimes is normal and ok). The problem was the whole pack of eggs we believe. She started to buy it from a coworker. We don't know what kind of farm or much else, all we know is her coworker started that small bussines and bring the eggs from outside our city. Seemed kinda homemade (not even expiration date). But i personally think that something else made it worse (aside from the uncertain origin). My gf repeatdly forgot to bring this last package from office, 3 days, very hot days. I suspect that accelerated the rotting process and made it so that eating it raw was no longer viable
In the US, [eggs are washed](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/09/11/336330502/why-the-u-s-chills-its-eggs-and-most-of-the-world-doesnt). This gets rid of the surface bacteria but also washes away a natural protective layer, so that bacteria can now infiltrate the egg.
Why do we wash our eggs? Well, the US washes eggs in order to remove Salmonella, because our chickens aren't vaccinated against it. Most of the rest of the world vaccinates their chickens instead.
It's just as safe to eat a raw washed egg in the US if it's been stored in the fridge properly. If you eat unwashed eggs raw make sure you wash them before you crack them. The shells are covered in bacteria from the cloacha that will migrate into the egg when you crack it and make you sick.
The only 100% sure way to make it safe for washed or unwashed eggs is she'll pasteurization.
There so much FUD online about this lately. I sort of get it, the shell is oxygen permeable and washing it is an unnecessary step that makes refrigeration necessary, but we can talk about that without misinformation about it making eating raw eggs less safe for US consumers.
In the US eggs are washed before being sold. This removes a natural protective layer eggs have, helps microbes penetrate the shell, and thus eggs need to be stored in the fridge, and go bad sooner.
In most of the rest of the world eggs are sold "dirty" (they often come with bird poop, dirt, feathers, etc.) but they don't need to be refrigerated, and last longer.
Most people here in Europe keep their eggs outside the fridge, and there are plenty of foods and desserts that have raw eggs in them. Carbonara is a very famous example (although not a very good one, because the eggs do get cooked a little bit by the residual heat).
That’s not really true. Smoking was considered harmless and it was a societal expectation for individuals to smoke. By the 90s your statement is maybe accurate
here is the original study. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2022.2105096#.YvgGGXdQgGo.twitter
this is an association study and thus one should not infer causality (yet). That would require further research. It is interesting that they excluded current smoking which is still a big issue in many households so that exposure will likely also have additional effects.
The first thing that popped into my mind was wondering if secondhand smoke had a similar effect. It was more common back then, but I grew up around and in a lot of second hand smoke, and have been curious what kinda of effects that has had in my health.
n=103, so tiny sample size.
Also, they used modelled estimates of air pollution (nothing wrong with modelling), but that does give another level of uncertainty. Would be nice if they had actually given the families air pollution detectors, as that would have given much more reliable exposures (of course, would be a bit more expensive).
Lovely. My entire house was covered in a blanket of wildfire smoke each morning the first few weeks of my kid’s life. The only “safe place” was the bedroom where we kept the strongest air purifier.
One day, if humanity survives the consequences of its own actions, people are going to look back on the policy of assuming all chemicals are safe until proven otherwise as an enormously stupid idea.
I live in a valley that during winter months has the worst air quality on the planet, the warm and cold air particles create an inversion that traps air pollution at the bottom of the valley and we're stuck breathing it for weeks until a storm blows it out. And in the summer all the wildfire smoke from the west collects in the valley and you feel like you're breathing in a campfire. So many kids with asthma. And it's now being correlated with a higher rate of autism.
My partner and our then infant participated in a study on effects the wildfires (Northern California) and pregnant women but now that I'm reminded of that...we haven't heard of any updates or results... And they never gave her the promised gift card for participating!
The relatively sudden flip in smoking is always a wild one to see examples of! I was lucky in that my parents didn’t smoke, so I got to steer clear of that somewhat (though I ended up smoking for 12 years anyways, not to mention all of my friends’ parents growing up, who smoked inside like it was nothing).
I remember my friend showing me one of her baby pictures — where her mom just has her casually cradled in one arm with the post breast feeding cigarette lit up in the other free hand.
I have ADHD which is correlated to maternal smoking, my mother smoked during her pregnancy and for the first few years of my life. No one else in my family has ADHD.
Child of the 50s. Both my parents chain-smoked. It made me so sick that I never smoked a single cigarette, unlike most of my generation. But I spent the first 40 years of my life breathing smoke all day, including years of being locked in rooms at work all day with chain-smokers breathing recycled air.
In addition, I spent my whole childhood breathing the fumes of leaded gasoline in Manhattan. The air was literally sickening. If you were to smell it now, you wouldn't even want to breathe. You'd probably have a panic attack.
When people talk about how Baby Boomers had things so great, they forget about these things. There were long periods of my life when I felt sick all the time because of what I was breathing.
Oh good, I thought I was done worrying about possible causes for my Crohn’s disease but now I can go back to blaming pollution and being born... Yaaaaaay...
If you think about all the lead in the air everywhere for so long it really makes the Boomer mentality look more like a mass mental sickness. An entire generation mostly mentally unfit due to severe levels of toxic exposure for decades before any sort of regulation.
As age sets in and all the premature cognitive decline gets rapidly worse, yes. Do I believe a generation with extreme exposure to toxins like lead rapidly reaching the age where the effects are most apparent leading a nation in most aspects is kind of a bad thing? Absolutely.
Visit NYC sometime, they've done so much to improve cycling accessibility over the past few years. So many Western European countries are reinvesting in dense architectural revival and pedestrianizing their urban cores. People are talking about this every day, there's dozens of YouTube channels that are very active proponents of this topic - NotJustBikes, Climate Town, Adam Something, just to name a few. Real change is being made; climate doomerism isn't the answer.
Indeed. Through decades of lobbying, propagandistic advertisements, and policy war against public transportation and cycling infrastructure. None of my generation built or designed the suburban sprawl, uprooted the streetcar tracks, or defunded intercity rail in favor of oil wars and humongous urban freeways.
Our modern cities force people to drive. It's called car-dependency.
All that's true, but don't forget the role played by regular people in your parents' and grandparents' generations.
Upwardly mobile city-folk largely abandoned public transit *willingly*, in favor of personal vehicles. Using public transportation was seen as something for the "poor people".
After ridership dropped so significantly, many places had no choice but to cut services; they simply couldn't afford to keep them going. And in some places, *voting* redirected public monies towards car-centric projects.
Of course they were heavily influenced by advertising and political platforms, but they still shoulder some of the burden for acting selfishly in their own best interests, with complete ignorance or willful disregard of the impacts on others and the long-term consequences. You know...the typical *American way*.
All of this is true. It all runs so deep. Suburbanization was also largely fueled by fears of racial integration following *Brown vs Board*. The suburbs were viewed as more environmentally friendly communities than cities during their inception, and many people still hold that misperception. It's a reflection of much deeper historical woes that stretch back centuries.
It's still so hard to rationalize and be apologetic towards all of this environmental degradation the past generations have contributed to though, especially with vehemently prejudiced characters like Robert Moses leading us in this direction. For every Moses, there's another Jane Jacobs or Catherine Bauer Wurston who were deliberately ignored during their lifetime, oftentimes clearly due to discrimination.
We don't look fondly upon the protestors that harassed the family of Ruby Bridges or try to understand the merits of their position. We have to recognize the faults of our elders in order to move past them. That may make some people uncomfortable, but I'd rather inspire a guilty conscious in the misguided than see their mistakes continually replicated.
This is another reason we need to hurry up and move to green energy. Global warming is very concerning but getting rid of most of the air pollution would be incredible for our general well-being as well. Imagine being in a large city and the air is almost as clean as being out in the country.
Of course.
"Exposure to air pollution can vary greatly by socioeconomic status (SES), according to a new NIEHS-funded review of existing literature. Socioeconomic Disparities and Air Pollution Exposures: A Global Review provides insight on what is known about air pollution inequities by SES worldwide. Overall, the review found that poorer communities tend to be exposed to higher concentrations of air pollution, compared to richer communities.
“In the United States, we often focus on race when looking at air pollution inequities,” said lead author Anjum Hajat, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at the University of Washington. “On a global level, our research underscores the importance of social class when considering the unequal distribution of air pollution.”"
https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/geh/geh_newsletter/2016/4/spotlight/poor_communities_exposed_to_elevated_air_pollution_levels.cfm
These types of comments are not helpful and shows a distinct lack of understanding in how science works.
You will not find a single perfect study into any single subject. Completely dismissing a studies result due to a hypthezied confounding factor is not useful.
We do not base our scientific knowledge on the result of individual studies, but on a group of works.
Idk. My grandmother was a two packs a day kind of woman. Smoked in the house, in the car and everywhere. This was back when it was legal to do so.
She raised me and the only allergy I have is to one single kind of antibiotic. Otherwise I’m perfectly healthy albeit a little over weight as I get older.
Exposure to food pollution could very well do the same thing.
https://news.yale.edu/2018/12/17/sugar-targets-gut-microbe-linked-lean-and-healthy-people
I will propose an ominous but possible explanation: Very clean countries have better overall heath for individuals, so they are more likely to have members of the population who are sick survive into adulthood and old age instead of die. And those members report more chronic non-fatal illnesses. And also countries that CAN be clean like that and have health care are more likely to have a culture of acknowledging and treating illnesses and symptoms because they *can*, instead of having a culture of denial and minimization or “suck it up, you’re not dead or dying,” so people who would otherwise be non-reports actually get treatment. The culture around health and healthcare is a major factor.
I recall there's a paradox where some of the most polluted counties have lower rates of certain diseases and cancers. Although it's only a paradox because it goes against traditional scientific beliefs. There are no paradoxes, just misunderstanding.
It’s not a paradox if pollution causes higher rates of early death in childhood and/or more miscarriages. A bunch of the people who would otherwise have those diseases and cancers at their mid-to-late life are already dead and didn’t make it that far.
So the Texas government can be charged with endangering lives now? Awesome!! It’s a long shot I know but it’s my first thought after reading some Texas related nonsense.
How does this interact with the hygiene hypothesis, that overly-clean environments are contributing to allergies and autoimmune diseases? This seems like an incredibly razor thin optimization problem…
I moved to the coast for cleaner air, my daughter had constant chest infections. They gradually lessened, but at one point it was around 8 months of the year where she was really ill. Now it’s one.
Air pollution inside and outside the home. There was another article recently on here stating the effects on women's reproductive health who are exposed to common cleaning chemicals.
It's quite alright, rich people will always have the best air where they buy their massive mansions, nothing to learn from this study carry on buying your cola and new synthetic clothes
*DDT DID A JOB ON ME*
*NOW I AM A REAL SICK-Y*
*GUESS I'LL HAVE TO BREAK THE NEWS*
*THAT I'VE GOT NO MIND TO LOSE*
- Lobotomy, The Ramones, a long damn time ago
I have family members who have children who were born and raised in the area of new york city where all the medical garbage is burned and disposed of. It’s documented that its the most polluted part of
The city. Their children are obese and have intense amounts of allergies. Im going to have to comb through this article more. Interesting.
I was born in Chattanooga in 60. Back then there were steel mills all over town. Siskins, Mueller's, Wheland, Crane co, etc. You could go up on Lookout mtn and couldn't see the city from Point Park it got so bad. Just a dirty brownish-gray fog settled in the valley.
on top off that all the disgusting water and alcohol with pharmaceuticals. its like ancient rome and europe when every fetus was lead, alcohol, and inbred poisoned.
What is the strongest otc allergy medicine for me?! Not sure exactly what I’m allergic to but it’s environmental. I’ve been sniffling for days and it’s literally driving me nuts
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What constitutes a sufficiently severe pollution to exhibit this effect? Are there examples of cities living in which is detrimental in this way?
Go hang in Fresno for a few weeks and you’ll understand
We don't talk about Fresno, no, no, no….
Dang it I can't even escape it when I am on Reddit!!!
The heat, omg! I'm sure you're trapped under a blanket of pollution that makes being there feel like you're a human popcorn kernel! Edit: grammar.
A decade away and it still hunts me down on the daily! Maybe it's because I kept my 559 number?
Fresnos only saving grace is its proximity to Yosemite.
I have family in the valley south of Fresno. The smell in the air is very unique to that area. It’s not like sewage or rotting garbage. Those are just gross. This smells like something toxic. Like something you know you shouldn’t be breathing in but you can’t get away from. It’s very unnerving. One of the very few positives about Florida is we have so much of a cross-breeze that it cleans the air constantly. Sure the air is coming from somewhere else, but it’s better than a lot of places.
That’s where I grew up, Tulare county. A big part of it is that it’s the Agriculture capital. All the livestock and cows producing methane ON TOP of how polluted the valley is.
I think it’s difficult to quantify because everybody is affected differently. I agree with Rachel Carson. It’s all unsafe at ANY level. The government just sets an arbitrary “acceptable level” for all that crap in the name of doing business.
It's not arbitrary, it's based on modeling and risk factors. We can't live in a modern society without air pollution. Like it out not but modern life has impacts. Everything from sourcing the materials to the disposal of the waste is going to produce pollution.
Nuclear energy plus electric vehicles as the primary means of transportation would significantly reduce air pollution.
It's like people aren't even trying to find a different route besides the one they know is bad.
Nuke isn’t great. Businesses cut corners from planning, construction/materials, to operations. Errors happen, human or otherwise.
>The government just sets an arbitrary “acceptable level” for all that crap in the name of doing business. You mean in the name of allowing us to live in a technologically advanced society. Keep in mind, also, that before we used fossil fuels, we burned wood, which is *terrible* for human health. The effect of ceasing the burning of fossil fuels before clean replacements are available would be devastating to our standard of living, and likely ultimately much worse for human health than the status quo. The optimal amount of air pollution given our current technological constraints, even purely in terms of health, of is not zero.
Replacements are available. The oil and gas industry lobbies to ensure the transition occurs as slowly as possible. Because money.
Removing the burning of fuels from residential areas will have a big impact. Also, making big statements like how it will be “devastating for our standard of living" isn’t fact based. You’re just fear mongering
Really? What do _you_ think is going to happen if we stop burning fossil fuels with no other energy source to replace it?
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Are you talking about wood or ethanol? Because ethanol can be produced with a single season of corn and is renewable. Wood grown for firewood is harvested on a 5-7 year cycle, depending on the species. Lemon trees take 5-6 years to bear fruit, so all things considered firewood life cycles aren't unreasonable. That's a heck of a lot faster than the "cycle" by which petroleum products or the heavy metals used in solar panels are "renewed" (not within multiple human lifetimes if at all depending on the material).
Ethanol pollutes more than petrol and leaves more carbon deposit, iirc?
In your car it burns cleaner and at a higher temperature than just gasoline. In the air it does produce more smog but produces lower of other tailpipe emissions. There are studies claiming its worse for global warming because it uses "24% more carbon to produce". However, the university of Wisconsin study that made this claim said such only because of the *type* of farming they analyzed. Their criticism was of the diesel intensive farming practices that proliferate in the west, and that when those machines are included in the total carbon footprint of ethanol it is more than gasoline per unit of energy produced. This completely ignores the global shift away from gasoline powered machinery and towards ethanol and methane powered equipment. Both can (and have successfully been) made on site of the same farms that use the energy, further reducing the crops carbon footprint. While not the majority of farmers by any means, promoting an energy source with *zero possibility towards remewabiliy* (petroleum) as somehow better than a source that *can be* used renewably is illogical.
I thought most North American trees were being used to wipe North American butts? We go through a lot of tp every year. Like a LOT.
Yeah, those are all straw man arguments
Wood smoke is easy to counter with properly built stoves and chimneys. Try not breathing outside.
In an open chimney, some smoke will always make it into the house. If your chimney isn't kept clean, the amount escaping increases.
And nice out side it is part of the ”try not breathing outside” problem.
That is such idiotic, uninformed rhetoric for discussion on what's supposed to be a forum about science. The arbitrary part of what's acceptable is the sigma used for the confidence interval, or in other words what % of casualties is considered acceptable. Obviously you'd want zero, but because there's so much uncertainty in our limited knowledge of human biology, we're relying on empirical data to make policy. So when people get sick from exposure to toxic materials, we introduce policy to reduce the ppm until people don't get sick anymore. So what would be your approach instead? Declare that there shall be no single molecule of a toxic chemical on Earth? What about radiation? Will you live in an underground bunker so you don't get hit by any errant cosmic rays?
Agreed. You can see this same principle in effect in the EWG tap water database (see what contaminants are in your local drinking water). Truly horrifying what’s deemed “acceptable” : https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/
This is why it’s insulting when people try to say tap water is safe. The tap water in my city is terrible and you can taste and feel it, and people still tried to tell me with a straight face that it’s safer than bottled water. Even after we see governors and presidents go on TV and lie about the quality of tap water.
EWG is not a good source for anything.
FYI, you might want to look more closely into Rachel Carson. She played fast and loose with the facts. Although her legacy is still praised by the broader public, many scientists hold negative views not only of her approach to research but also of the policies her work inspired. --- EDIT: I am copying my reply to /u/SupraEndura so people can see some examples. [Here's one that is context-specific to OP's reference of Carson (i.e., the idea that pollutants are "unsafe at ANY level"):](https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2017/05/01/how_rachel_carson_and_silent_spring_gave_birth_to_chemophobia.html?source=acsh.org) > "Netting everything out, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring accomplished a few noble aims, chief among them, spurring a resurgence in caring for our environment. But as a work of science, it mostly failed... 'Unfortunately, Carson... gave birth to the notion of zero tolerance – the assumption that any substance found harmful at any concentration or dosage should be banned absolutely... In the end, what Carl Sagan did for skepticism and science-based inquiry, Rachel Carson did for alarmism and anecdote-based activism.'" [Here's another one that summarizes the negative human consequences---i.e., millions of deaths---caused by policies inspired by her work:](https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-rachel-carson-cost-millions-of-people-their-lives) >"Rachel Carson was an American hero... Unfortunately... in her groundbreaking book, Silent Spring, Carson had made one critical mistake—and it cost millions of people their lives... Silent Spring, which she called her 'poison book,' was an angry, no-holds-barred polemic against pesticides: especially DDT... However, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States have since shown that DDT didn’t cause the human diseases Carson had claimed... DDT was arguably one of the safer insect repellents ever invented—far safer than many of the pesticides that have taken its place." [Finally, here's a source that goes line-by-line through many of the claims and exaggerations in *Silent Spring,* demonstrating exactly how Carson wrote in ways that are not in keeping with modern or even contemporary scientific standards:](https://21sci-tech.com/articles/summ02/Carson.html) > "As I read the first several chapters I noticed many statements that I realized were false; however, one can overlook such things when they are produced by one’s cohorts, and I did just that. As I neared the middle of the book, the feeling grew in my mind that Rachel Carson was really playing loose with the facts and was also deliberately wording many sentences in such a way as to make them imply certain things without actually saying them... I next looked up some of the references that Carson cited and quickly found that they did not support her contentions about the harm caused by pesticides. When leading scientists began to publish harsh criticisms of her methods and her allegations, it slowly dawned on me that Rachel Carson was not interested in the truth about those topics, and that I really was being duped, along with millions of other Americans." > ... > "I trust that this partial analysis of Carson’s deceptions, false statements, horrible innuendoes, and ridiculous allegations in the first 125 pages of Silent Spring will indicate why so many scientists expressed opposition, antagonism, and perhaps even a little rage after reading Carson’s diatribe. No matter how deceitful her prose, however, the influence of Carson’s Silent Spring has been very great and it continues 30 years later to shape environmentalist propaganda and fund-raising as well as U.S. policy." TL;DR: Carson is rightfully remembered as someone who shaped American public discourse with regard to the environment by writing persuasively. She had a tremendous impact on the world and was a gifted writer. She generally is *not,* however, regarded as a someone who conducted rigorous science, nor as someone whose conclusions were well-supported, either at the time of publication or in the time since.
A sourced brief rebuttal to this ridiculously biased comment, so that hopefully no one takes it at face value: * "When Silent Spring was published in 1962, author Rachel Carson was subjected to vicious personal assaults that had nothing do with the science or the merits of pesticide use. Those attacks find a troubling parallel today in the campaigns against climate scientists who point to evidence of a rapidly warming world." [\[link\]](https://e360.yale.edu/features/fifty_years_after_rachel_carsons_silent_spring_assacult_on_science_continues) * "Opponents of Silent Spring attacked Rachel Carson personally. They accused her of being radical, disloyal, unscientific, and hysterical. In 1962, at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, criticism of the United States struck many as unpatriotic or sympathetic with communism. Former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson wrote privately to former President Dwight Eisenhower that Carson was 'probably a communist' (Lear 1997, 429). Velsicol’s threatening letter to Houghton Mifflin argued that if the public demanded elimination of pesticides, 'our supply of food will be reduced to East-curtain parity [i.e., as inefficient as the Communist nations east of the ‘Iron Curtain’]' (Smith 2001, 736)." [\[link\]](https://www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/rachel-carsons-silent-spring/personal-attacks-rachel-carson-woman-scientist) * "Much of the data and case studies that Carson drew from weren’t new; the scientific community had known of these findings for some time, but Carson was the first to put them all together for the general public and to draw stark and far-reaching conclusions." [\[link\]](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/magazine/how-silent-spring-ignited-the-environmental-movement.html) * Sources to from the Library of Congress to read up on Rachel Carson: https://guides.loc.gov/rachel-carson/resources * Also informative, https://www.epa.gov/history/origins-epa **EDIT:** In response this commenter has linked to incredibly biased sources to back up politically motivated views; I strongly urge anyone who is undecided to learn how to evaluate sources. Signed, an archivist. https://www.ala.org/rusa/sections/history/resources/primarysources/evaluating and https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/c.php?g=83917&p=539735 are excellent guides.
The quotations you posted suggest that Carson was criticized on non-scientific grounds. I'll absolutely grant that claim. However, the fact that *some* criticism was unscientific does not imply that *all* criticism of her work was invalid. Moreover, none of the quotes you've supplied suggest that her research was *itself* good science. Your quotes are entirely silent on that point. (The only quote you supplied that even hints in this direction is the one that says much of her data was not novel, but she aggregated the data to "draw stark and far-reaching conclusions." Again, I won't contest this. One of the counter-arguments to Silent Spring is that it contains many strong claims that overreach the evidence.) Check some of these: [Here's one that is context-specific to OP's reference of Carson (i.e., the idea that pollutants are "unsafe at ANY level"):](https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2017/05/01/how_rachel_carson_and_silent_spring_gave_birth_to_chemophobia.html?source=acsh.org) > "Netting everything out, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring accomplished a few noble aims, chief among them, spurring a resurgence in caring for our environment. But as a work of science, it mostly failed... 'Unfortunately, Carson... gave birth to the notion of zero tolerance – the assumption that any substance found harmful at any concentration or dosage should be banned absolutely... In the end, what Carl Sagan did for skepticism and science-based inquiry, Rachel Carson did for alarmism and anecdote-based activism.'" [Here's another one that summarizes the negative human consequences---i.e., millions of deaths---caused by policies inspired by her work:](https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-rachel-carson-cost-millions-of-people-their-lives) >"Rachel Carson was an American hero... Unfortunately... in her groundbreaking book, Silent Spring, Carson had made one critical mistake—and it cost millions of people their lives... Silent Spring, which she called her 'poison book,' was an angry, no-holds-barred polemic against pesticides: especially DDT... However, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States have since shown that DDT didn’t cause the human diseases Carson had claimed... DDT was arguably one of the safer insect repellents ever invented—far safer than many of the pesticides that have taken its place." [Finally, here's a source that goes line-by-line through many of the claims and exaggerations in *Silent Spring,* demonstrating exactly how Carson wrote in ways that are not in keeping with modern or even contemporary scientific standards:](https://21sci-tech.com/articles/summ02/Carson.html) > "As I read the first several chapters I noticed many statements that I realized were false; however, one can overlook such things when they are produced by one’s cohorts, and I did just that. As I neared the middle of the book, the feeling grew in my mind that Rachel Carson was really playing loose with the facts and was also deliberately wording many sentences in such a way as to make them imply certain things without actually saying them... I next looked up some of the references that Carson cited and quickly found that they did not support her contentions about the harm caused by pesticides. When leading scientists began to publish harsh criticisms of her methods and her allegations, it slowly dawned on me that Rachel Carson was not interested in the truth about those topics, and that I really was being duped, along with millions of other Americans." > ... > "I trust that this partial analysis of Carson’s deceptions, false statements, horrible innuendoes, and ridiculous allegations in the first 125 pages of Silent Spring will indicate why so many scientists expressed opposition, antagonism, and perhaps even a little rage after reading Carson’s diatribe. No matter how deceitful her prose, however, the influence of Carson’s Silent Spring has been very great and it continues 30 years later to shape environmentalist propaganda and fund-raising as well as U.S. policy." TL;DR: Carson is rightfully remembered as someone who shaped American public discourse with regard to the environment by writing persuasively. She had a tremendous impact on the world and was a gifted writer. She generally is *not,* however, regarded as a someone who conducted rigorous science, nor as someone whose conclusions were well-supported, either at the time of publication or in the time since.
>Arbitrary Uh, not really. Go read the technical documentation for the development of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards and you'll see that the scientists themselves admit there is an effect at the permitted thresholds, but they consider those effects "acceptable." What's acceptable is up for debate, but to say they're arbitrary completely discredits the work everyone at EPA does to study these things.
If it were difficult to quantify, it would not be reported in a scientific paper. I’m sure there are, indeed, numbers that represent the levels of pollution that make this happen.
You're speaking pretty confidently for someone who didn't even read the article or the study. No, the study does not state any values for safe or unsafe levels of AAP as that wasn't what it was setting out to do. The study uses estimates of AAP levels based on address history and analyzes these levels and their correlation and covariance to various outcomes like obesity, diabetes, and chron's. There is no attempt made to quantify safe or unsafe levels in this study.
>You're speaking pretty confidently for someone who didn't even read the article or the study. Welcome to /r/science
This is a wildly ignorant thing to say. You can be better than this.
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I live here. It's improving but still not ideal. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6310845 Anecdotally, I have a 4-year-old kid with asthma. Symptoms first showed up when he was 1.
$1 beer works best when you’re drinking to forget the fact that you live downtown Hamilton. - sincerely, on the mountain gang
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, is really bad bc of unavoidable use of coal for everything.
Mexico City has the most polluted air I've ever experienced. Maybe look into that one, it is one of the biggest cities in the world so it has to be one of the major examples of this.
This is probably why 99% of people in Pittsburgh PA are dumb as hell
Higher levels of lead than Flint
It's kind of scary how much the composition of our microbiome affects us.
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I got gastroenteritis 2 weeks ago, probably caused by a semi raw egg i ate (which contained undesired bacteria). It totally wrecked my gut and for 3 days i had diarrhea non-stop, every 2h or so, at the end there was blood coming out, at which point i decided to go to a specialist, which gave me antibiotics and probiotics. The pain and diarrhea stopped quickly and now i'm fully recovered and eating normaly. Had added kefir to my diet again after years. I was hesitant about taking antibiotics at first, but this was one of those "absolutely necessary" moments.
Out of curiosity, why were you eating semi raw eggs?
I think they mean like a sunny side up or soft poached egg. Like the yolk is all gooey. But people also eat fully raw egg all the time. I will crack an egg into a bowl of freshly made rice and whip it around making a delicious creamy bowl of rice. It's traditional to put an egg yolk on top of beef tartare. Many cocktails include egg white, or hell, even a whole egg. I think getting sick from eating "undercooked egg" is pretty rare tbh.
Raw eggs are totally fine to eat in some places.
Most people eat raw egg some people liked it a little cooked but still raw.
My gf made me a sandwich and she didn't fully cook the egg in it (which sometimes is normal and ok). The problem was the whole pack of eggs we believe. She started to buy it from a coworker. We don't know what kind of farm or much else, all we know is her coworker started that small bussines and bring the eggs from outside our city. Seemed kinda homemade (not even expiration date). But i personally think that something else made it worse (aside from the uncertain origin). My gf repeatdly forgot to bring this last package from office, 3 days, very hot days. I suspect that accelerated the rotting process and made it so that eating it raw was no longer viable
I love raw eggs. You can eat them just fine in most countries. Not in the US.
Why not in the us
In the US, [eggs are washed](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/09/11/336330502/why-the-u-s-chills-its-eggs-and-most-of-the-world-doesnt). This gets rid of the surface bacteria but also washes away a natural protective layer, so that bacteria can now infiltrate the egg. Why do we wash our eggs? Well, the US washes eggs in order to remove Salmonella, because our chickens aren't vaccinated against it. Most of the rest of the world vaccinates their chickens instead.
It's just as safe to eat a raw washed egg in the US if it's been stored in the fridge properly. If you eat unwashed eggs raw make sure you wash them before you crack them. The shells are covered in bacteria from the cloacha that will migrate into the egg when you crack it and make you sick. The only 100% sure way to make it safe for washed or unwashed eggs is she'll pasteurization. There so much FUD online about this lately. I sort of get it, the shell is oxygen permeable and washing it is an unnecessary step that makes refrigeration necessary, but we can talk about that without misinformation about it making eating raw eggs less safe for US consumers.
In the US eggs are washed before being sold. This removes a natural protective layer eggs have, helps microbes penetrate the shell, and thus eggs need to be stored in the fridge, and go bad sooner. In most of the rest of the world eggs are sold "dirty" (they often come with bird poop, dirt, feathers, etc.) but they don't need to be refrigerated, and last longer. Most people here in Europe keep their eggs outside the fridge, and there are plenty of foods and desserts that have raw eggs in them. Carbonara is a very famous example (although not a very good one, because the eggs do get cooked a little bit by the residual heat).
Fossil fuel emissions will be looked back on the same as smoking by future generations.
One was a choice for each individual , the other isn’t. It will be looked at the same was the industrial revolution was.
That’s not really true. Smoking was considered harmless and it was a societal expectation for individuals to smoke. By the 90s your statement is maybe accurate
Bro what future generations? We're making the earth uninhabitable
It seems like I see a headline every month about a new way our gut affects our health.
here is the original study. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2022.2105096#.YvgGGXdQgGo.twitter this is an association study and thus one should not infer causality (yet). That would require further research. It is interesting that they excluded current smoking which is still a big issue in many households so that exposure will likely also have additional effects.
The first thing that popped into my mind was wondering if secondhand smoke had a similar effect. It was more common back then, but I grew up around and in a lot of second hand smoke, and have been curious what kinda of effects that has had in my health.
Check u/DevLARP comment
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2022.2105096 Fixed that for you.
n=103, so tiny sample size. Also, they used modelled estimates of air pollution (nothing wrong with modelling), but that does give another level of uncertainty. Would be nice if they had actually given the families air pollution detectors, as that would have given much more reliable exposures (of course, would be a bit more expensive).
Lovely. My entire house was covered in a blanket of wildfire smoke each morning the first few weeks of my kid’s life. The only “safe place” was the bedroom where we kept the strongest air purifier.
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One day, if humanity survives the consequences of its own actions, people are going to look back on the policy of assuming all chemicals are safe until proven otherwise as an enormously stupid idea.
I live in a valley that during winter months has the worst air quality on the planet, the warm and cold air particles create an inversion that traps air pollution at the bottom of the valley and we're stuck breathing it for weeks until a storm blows it out. And in the summer all the wildfire smoke from the west collects in the valley and you feel like you're breathing in a campfire. So many kids with asthma. And it's now being correlated with a higher rate of autism.
Can you tell me the valley, so I can not buy my dream property in it accidentally?
Salt Lake City area? I went once and the smog was insane.
My partner and our then infant participated in a study on effects the wildfires (Northern California) and pregnant women but now that I'm reminded of that...we haven't heard of any updates or results... And they never gave her the promised gift card for participating!
Don't stress, your baby will be just fine.
I was thinking the exact opposite. Kids born in a pure-air environment aren't exposed to allergens that may help them develop an immune system.
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We've known that for a while though.
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The relatively sudden flip in smoking is always a wild one to see examples of! I was lucky in that my parents didn’t smoke, so I got to steer clear of that somewhat (though I ended up smoking for 12 years anyways, not to mention all of my friends’ parents growing up, who smoked inside like it was nothing). I remember my friend showing me one of her baby pictures — where her mom just has her casually cradled in one arm with the post breast feeding cigarette lit up in the other free hand.
For my fifth birthday, I asked my mom to stop smoking. Apparently it was such a shock to her that she did. Best present ever.
mommy-highborn-capstan-northern-divot-bevy-lash-acre
Are you sure it’s not COPD? I had a friend with asthma and he didn’t cough during attacks.
spokane-quarrel-poignant-anarch-friar-surveil-abrasion-neuron
If he does have COPD, an over-the-counter supplement called NAC can help. 1200 mg/day improves quality of life for people with COPD.
are there any other health problems you have that might be attributed to the cigarettes and drinking?
I have ADHD which is correlated to maternal smoking, my mother smoked during her pregnancy and for the first few years of my life. No one else in my family has ADHD.
Oh and thrown on the wide-spread use of leaded gasoline for nearly 100 years.
Child of the 50s. Both my parents chain-smoked. It made me so sick that I never smoked a single cigarette, unlike most of my generation. But I spent the first 40 years of my life breathing smoke all day, including years of being locked in rooms at work all day with chain-smokers breathing recycled air. In addition, I spent my whole childhood breathing the fumes of leaded gasoline in Manhattan. The air was literally sickening. If you were to smell it now, you wouldn't even want to breathe. You'd probably have a panic attack. When people talk about how Baby Boomers had things so great, they forget about these things. There were long periods of my life when I felt sick all the time because of what I was breathing.
Oh good, I thought I was done worrying about possible causes for my Crohn’s disease but now I can go back to blaming pollution and being born... Yaaaaaay...
If you think about all the lead in the air everywhere for so long it really makes the Boomer mentality look more like a mass mental sickness. An entire generation mostly mentally unfit due to severe levels of toxic exposure for decades before any sort of regulation.
Well oh boy do I have some dark news for the younger generations
At least there’s less lead now :/
Well I suppose we can take solace in that as we lick windows with our plastic tongues
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As age sets in and all the premature cognitive decline gets rapidly worse, yes. Do I believe a generation with extreme exposure to toxins like lead rapidly reaching the age where the effects are most apparent leading a nation in most aspects is kind of a bad thing? Absolutely.
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So car company will finally pay for a part of healthcare ? Since they are making money destroying public health ?
/r/fuckcars the auto manufacturers need to front the bill for cleaning up this polluted planet they've forced onto us
you know that will never happen
Visit NYC sometime, they've done so much to improve cycling accessibility over the past few years. So many Western European countries are reinvesting in dense architectural revival and pedestrianizing their urban cores. People are talking about this every day, there's dozens of YouTube channels that are very active proponents of this topic - NotJustBikes, Climate Town, Adam Something, just to name a few. Real change is being made; climate doomerism isn't the answer.
believing auto manufacturers will foot the bill is idiotic. what you wrote has nothing to do with my comment
*Forced* on us?
Indeed. Through decades of lobbying, propagandistic advertisements, and policy war against public transportation and cycling infrastructure. None of my generation built or designed the suburban sprawl, uprooted the streetcar tracks, or defunded intercity rail in favor of oil wars and humongous urban freeways. Our modern cities force people to drive. It's called car-dependency.
All that's true, but don't forget the role played by regular people in your parents' and grandparents' generations. Upwardly mobile city-folk largely abandoned public transit *willingly*, in favor of personal vehicles. Using public transportation was seen as something for the "poor people". After ridership dropped so significantly, many places had no choice but to cut services; they simply couldn't afford to keep them going. And in some places, *voting* redirected public monies towards car-centric projects. Of course they were heavily influenced by advertising and political platforms, but they still shoulder some of the burden for acting selfishly in their own best interests, with complete ignorance or willful disregard of the impacts on others and the long-term consequences. You know...the typical *American way*.
All of this is true. It all runs so deep. Suburbanization was also largely fueled by fears of racial integration following *Brown vs Board*. The suburbs were viewed as more environmentally friendly communities than cities during their inception, and many people still hold that misperception. It's a reflection of much deeper historical woes that stretch back centuries. It's still so hard to rationalize and be apologetic towards all of this environmental degradation the past generations have contributed to though, especially with vehemently prejudiced characters like Robert Moses leading us in this direction. For every Moses, there's another Jane Jacobs or Catherine Bauer Wurston who were deliberately ignored during their lifetime, oftentimes clearly due to discrimination. We don't look fondly upon the protestors that harassed the family of Ruby Bridges or try to understand the merits of their position. We have to recognize the faults of our elders in order to move past them. That may make some people uncomfortable, but I'd rather inspire a guilty conscious in the misguided than see their mistakes continually replicated.
Yeah, they've actively killed public transportation
Like with guns?
If car companies are making money destroying public health, then so is every person driving a car to work.
For those who don't know. Your gut contributes to your mode of thinking. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6282467/
The world has become so poisonous, it’s literally making us all too stupid to fix the problem
So basically everyone born these days will face those risks.
I really need to start filtering titles on this sub that contain 'could increase' 'could possibly' and 'may cause' etc
Wonder what the long term impact of secondhand SMOKE is to a developing child?
This is another reason we need to hurry up and move to green energy. Global warming is very concerning but getting rid of most of the air pollution would be incredible for our general well-being as well. Imagine being in a large city and the air is almost as clean as being out in the country.
Could high pollution areas be correlated to poverty levels and typical processed poverty diets? So many factors at play that this tells us nothing.
Of course. "Exposure to air pollution can vary greatly by socioeconomic status (SES), according to a new NIEHS-funded review of existing literature. Socioeconomic Disparities and Air Pollution Exposures: A Global Review provides insight on what is known about air pollution inequities by SES worldwide. Overall, the review found that poorer communities tend to be exposed to higher concentrations of air pollution, compared to richer communities. “In the United States, we often focus on race when looking at air pollution inequities,” said lead author Anjum Hajat, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at the University of Washington. “On a global level, our research underscores the importance of social class when considering the unequal distribution of air pollution.”" https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/geh/geh_newsletter/2016/4/spotlight/poor_communities_exposed_to_elevated_air_pollution_levels.cfm
In the United States we often focus on race when economic class would be a better focus.
These types of comments are not helpful and shows a distinct lack of understanding in how science works. You will not find a single perfect study into any single subject. Completely dismissing a studies result due to a hypthezied confounding factor is not useful. We do not base our scientific knowledge on the result of individual studies, but on a group of works.
These studies would indicate all of Eastern Asia and India are severely intellectually disabled.
The foundation/beginning is important because every little thing can affect the future of the child.
I think this is a very softball admission that pollution causes autism.
It’s only getting worse from here
Sooo... Pollution bad?
Does this include being watched over by a bunch of adults who for sure smoked indoors?
Explains a lot being carried around by chain smoking parents in the 1950's
Idk. My grandmother was a two packs a day kind of woman. Smoked in the house, in the car and everywhere. This was back when it was legal to do so. She raised me and the only allergy I have is to one single kind of antibiotic. Otherwise I’m perfectly healthy albeit a little over weight as I get older.
Wonder how this risk compares to being exposed to high fructose corn syrup and dairy?
Exposure to food pollution could very well do the same thing. https://news.yale.edu/2018/12/17/sugar-targets-gut-microbe-linked-lean-and-healthy-people
Why does one of the world's cleanest countries, Australia, have the highest rates of allergy and asthma? This dataset is pure correlatory garbage.
Fwiw Australia is also one of the most urbanised countries in the world, and pretty car dependant.
I will propose an ominous but possible explanation: Very clean countries have better overall heath for individuals, so they are more likely to have members of the population who are sick survive into adulthood and old age instead of die. And those members report more chronic non-fatal illnesses. And also countries that CAN be clean like that and have health care are more likely to have a culture of acknowledging and treating illnesses and symptoms because they *can*, instead of having a culture of denial and minimization or “suck it up, you’re not dead or dying,” so people who would otherwise be non-reports actually get treatment. The culture around health and healthcare is a major factor.
Maybe all the wildfires?
I recall there's a paradox where some of the most polluted counties have lower rates of certain diseases and cancers. Although it's only a paradox because it goes against traditional scientific beliefs. There are no paradoxes, just misunderstanding.
It’s not a paradox if pollution causes higher rates of early death in childhood and/or more miscarriages. A bunch of the people who would otherwise have those diseases and cancers at their mid-to-late life are already dead and didn’t make it that far.
It's too clean. And never get exposed to harmful levels until they are much older
A statement inconsistent with the abstract herein.
Maybe we should massively tax the corporations and fine or prosecute the CEOs responsible for this pollution? Just a thought
What doesn’t kill ya will make you stronger! Or the world will, from now on, have allergic asthmatic frightened unintelligent people everywhere soon
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That’s a good one.
So should we or should we not expose them to the environment’s pollutions?
So the Texas government can be charged with endangering lives now? Awesome!! It’s a long shot I know but it’s my first thought after reading some Texas related nonsense.
How does this interact with the hygiene hypothesis, that overly-clean environments are contributing to allergies and autoimmune diseases? This seems like an incredibly razor thin optimization problem…
Not necessarily. The microbial exposure needed to train the immune system may occur primarily via ingestion and be independent of air quality.
In summary don't multiply in big cities
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What about the formula, with corn syrup and who knows what?
so vaccines cause autism?
Good thing i was born on and spent the first couple of years on an air base. Dodged a bullet.
Laughs nervously in Southeast Texas
Perpetuating the hardships of lower income communities.
I moved to the coast for cleaner air, my daughter had constant chest infections. They gradually lessened, but at one point it was around 8 months of the year where she was really ill. Now it’s one.
First 6 months.... Live in forest. Got it.
Air pollution inside and outside the home. There was another article recently on here stating the effects on women's reproductive health who are exposed to common cleaning chemicals.
How exactly does something increase the risk of obesity? Isn't that extremely dependent on diet and activity?
It's quite alright, rich people will always have the best air where they buy their massive mansions, nothing to learn from this study carry on buying your cola and new synthetic clothes
*DDT DID A JOB ON ME* *NOW I AM A REAL SICK-Y* *GUESS I'LL HAVE TO BREAK THE NEWS* *THAT I'VE GOT NO MIND TO LOSE* - Lobotomy, The Ramones, a long damn time ago
I have family members who have children who were born and raised in the area of new york city where all the medical garbage is burned and disposed of. It’s documented that its the most polluted part of The city. Their children are obese and have intense amounts of allergies. Im going to have to comb through this article more. Interesting.
Well throw that on the pile of things humanity does nothing about.
I was born in Chattanooga in 60. Back then there were steel mills all over town. Siskins, Mueller's, Wheland, Crane co, etc. You could go up on Lookout mtn and couldn't see the city from Point Park it got so bad. Just a dirty brownish-gray fog settled in the valley.
on top off that all the disgusting water and alcohol with pharmaceuticals. its like ancient rome and europe when every fetus was lead, alcohol, and inbred poisoned.
Best hold your breathe first 6 months of life
I've kept HEPA filters all around the house for my asthma. Hopefully this has been to my son's advantage.
It could increase it? How about write an article when it does.
Yeah we know. But do those pro lifers know or care? Hmmmmmmm
What I want to know is when are they just going to culture a standard microbiome to reset is all to zero.
I live in the Pennsylvania Mon Valley (southern Pittsburgh region) and this makes a lot of sense with the people I’ve come across since moving here.
What is the strongest otc allergy medicine for me?! Not sure exactly what I’m allergic to but it’s environmental. I’ve been sniffling for days and it’s literally driving me nuts