It only defines the diameter of the particles but can be composed of very different elements. From salt that dissolves in the lungs to toxic metals.
Currently it is extremely difficult to get a comprehensive understanding of the health impacts of these particles.
Much more research needs to be done to understand which particle compositions and thus what sources of air pollution (eg traffic, wildfires, factories, landfills, ports etc) have what kind of health effects.
If you are interested to see an image how different PM2.5 particle look like, have a look at the photo in this blog post that one of our in-house scientists wrote [1].
[1] https://www.airgradient.com/blog/pm25-is-not-pm25/
(Edited and replaced weight with diameter)
> 0.3 micrometers are even smaller than the wavelength of light, which demonstrates the problem: how should we see something that is smaller than light itself?
Diameter, not weight. PM2.5 is particles of diameter 2.5μm or less.
I don't deal with gas cleaning, but at those scales, if you work a lot with applied processes like filtration and separation, you can ballpark things like daltons with mass and size. I know I do with MWCOs.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266601722... (this groups methods can be substantially improved).
Having done some additional follow on work in the space -- the results definitely do not follow socioeconomic boundaries as one might expect.
Roads are a huge contributor.
It checks out compared to countries without these issues, so 15 years to me sounds exaggerated, especially if we're talking about areas close to each other.
Such a huge shortening normally involves heavy metal pollution of the drinking water and soil.
It would be nice if the article had mentioned this issue. A metastudy of lots of bad correlational studies is just garbage in garbage out. So, did they address the issue?
There are ways round it, by the way. As a recent review said:
"it is unclear why federal ISAs that are the input into all regulatory analyses tend not to incorporate the emerging body of evidence on the effects of air pollution on health outcomes from the economics literature despite the additional rigor imposed by the emphasis on causal inference."
https://www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fulltext/resource/15...
Having the study at hand is nice of course, but environnemental factors being alleviated through money and discriminatory policies is rampant enough I don't get the surprise.
People using high quality water filters or straight buy clean water tanks in areas where tap water is bad, getting better indoor air filtering, blocking construction of pollution sources to move them further away (near poorer areas) in the county, redlining/manipulateing zoning rules to make it systematic etc.
It's a old as humans.
None of that applies to PM2.5 kind of pollution.
Comparing to the national average helps put it into perspective but doesn't make sense as sanity check. Flynt could be a better data point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevailing_winds
That's why we learned to look at on wich side of the trees the moss grows to find the compass directions.
Also, here in the EU, life expectancy varies a lot. Interestingly, not-so-rich countries such as Italy and Spain win over richer Austria, Germany and Denmark by a year or so.
Life expectancy in the EU varies a lot by country. Someone born in Sweden has a life expectancy over ten years longer than someone born in Latvia.
That one study feels like a paper that was engineered to make headlines and social media sound bites, not to be an accurate look at the entire population.
Intuitively, I don't mind the ones 0.5 mi away from the freeway, especially if the prevailing winds place them up-wind. I have no idea if that's correct, but it seems to me that you'd have a fairly fast drop-off in noxious substances as you move away from the freeway.
We also have this recent trend of building huge apartment complexes right next to the freeways while many of the nicer areas are given to commercial and industrial uses. Makes no sense to me.
If you have children please, please plan for late life care. And if you're going to be caring for either of your parents start planning and build a support network. By the time I knew I needed help I was drowning. Learn how to ask for help. I thought I was a relatively progressive 50 year old man, but it turns out help is a 4-letter word.
As hard as it is, supporting family members also need to learn to prioritize taking care of themselves and avoiding a spiral towards burnout. With dementia, there is often a time when the patient needs a more controlled environment with 24x7 supervision. Dementia sleep schedules and behaviors fall apart and are not really compatible with a family caregiver's own health needs.
Depending on the dementia case, risky behaviors may emerge at night, and having observant caregivers awake 24x7 may be very important. The financial picture for this is quite difficult in the US. Normally this requires a care facility at some point, as it is impossibly expensive to bring sufficient dementia care via visiting professionals.
To safely handle dementia with "sundowning" and wandering behaviors, you usually need a facility that has about a dozen residents or more. Then, budgets allow for multiple onsite staff and overnight wakeful staff. This can bring more distinct staff roles too, e.g. cooking and housekeeping versus care.
Even this may be overwhelmingly costly, to the point where the dementia ends up depleting the estate and then shifting to some kind of government support. For family or trustees managing this process, it is full of difficult decisions regarding budget and care tradeoffs. For example, do you splurge on "nicer" facilities or other caregiver factors early on, or try to reserve more funds for the inevitable crises? Dementia can be a drawn-out process, where care needs expand to a crescendo before collapsing back to hospice care, which may be more like other terminal illnesses.
On a personal note to anyone in this situation: Do not go it alone. Being a caregiver is hard, but being a caregiver for someone with serious memory issues is brutal and requires 24/7 monitoring. Your loved one will not always cooperate. They may change into someone who does not resemble the person you knew. Many states require such persons to be homed somewhere with a 24/7 nursing staff. Plan accordingly.
While I have lots of guns, the thought of putting a bullet in my head is not something I could follow through on, would not want my family to have to identify me looking like that.
For situations that truly have no hope and the only outcome is suffering both of yourself and your family. I understand it now.
I’ve a similar view for myself but my GF find it creepy and don’t want discuss it, yet. That’s embarrassing, I don’t want to cause grief by a surprise disparition.
Practically speaking there’s NGOs that can help and even send kits after a (long) checkup. Inert gas asphyxia seems to be a classic as it’s fast, painless and quite cheap/easy.
Meaningless number. Make it % or incidence rate per 1000 or something.
57 million people? That’s not so many compared to the billion in China or India. Or is it? Compare it to cancers or car accidents.
Just type it into a calculator. The computer will do all the work.
Current world population is ~8 billion so 57_000_000 / 8_000_000_000 = 0.007125
So 0.7% or 7 per 1000 people.
Roughly 10% of the world population, or 800 million, fall within this age group.
57_000_000 / 800_000_000 ~= 7%
That's quite a large number of people who will be impacted.
> a number that is expected to almost triple to 152.8 million cases by 2050
I don't have the statistics for the elderly population in 2050, but if we assume the proportion is the same (it won't be), then the higher incidence case rate is sobering.
It's nearly 20%.
"The Lancet study indicates that although the total number of dementia cases is expected to increase substantially, the percentage of the global population affected, once age-adjusted, remains nearly constant, with just a 0.1% change globally between 2019 and 2050"
Lithium can be viewed an antioxidant – correctly or not?, I do not know.
Air pollution can be viewed as oxidative stress.
It’s interesting to search Google Scholar for “lithium antioxidant”.
But it apparently somehow modulates other systems that help with oxidative stress.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/coal-pollution-is-ki... | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393512... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2024.118787
Warehouses:
Air pollution impacts from warehousing in the United States uncovered with satellite data - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50000-0 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-50000-0
Where Warehouses Are Built, Air Pollution Follows - https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/153471/where-wareho...
Impact of Warehouse Expansion on Ambient PM2.5 and Elemental Carbon Levels in Southern California's Disadvantaged Communities: A Two-Decade Analysis - https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GH00... | https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GH001091
Global air quality map: https://explore.openaq.org/
(this is why it is so important to electrify trucks and to disallow industrial and commercial parks with lots of truck traffic near residential and school areas; all of this combustion/fossil energy pollution is creating health debt that will catch up with us)
As a motorbike rider I can taste the diesel fumes as soon as I'm behind one in a way that's unlike any petrol car.
There's large particulates being thrown out by even the most luxurious diesel cars that you simply couldn't tell if you're behind in a car.
Here's a report with some longer term trends (warning: 2MB PDF download): https://www.london.gov.uk/media/105046/download . Air pollution is down across London, and sharply so on the most proximate roadside sensors.
IKEA has recently released a decent air filter for ~$40.
Good ones cost a bit more, but even the basic one removes plenty of small particles with an HEPA-like stage.
Nobody thinks about the quality of their air until it's been hurting them.
I was one of many.
But they also show that it instead of eliminating the root cause of the disease, the solution might be eliminating its symptoms instead. Cause one woman who had the gene defied all odds and exhibited the symptom of the disease in her 70s. The reasoning is that another gene she had, the Christchurch gene, protected her brain from the disease. So if someone can use that info to prevent symptoms of the disease eliminating the root cause would become secondary.
I assume you mean: "exhibited no symptoms of the disease until her 70s".
Other than luck, did they have any idea why she was able to resist the disease for so long?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camphine
Better options existed but weren't as affordable.