This airborne killer has not gone away
When I taught a class recently on caring for the planet, I gave a personal example of how I have experienced air pollution. Immediately a married couple in class laughed and said they lived in the same place and the same thing had happened to them. In the 80s I lived in Pasadena, California. One summer, guests from out of town came to visit me. After a few days they left, not knowing that there were mountains just a few miles up the road. On hazy, smoggy days, those hills were completely invisible.
To jog or not to jog
I remember in the mid 80s, looking out at the whiteness where those mountains should be, wondering whether to go out the door for a jog. Would running outdoors benefit me on the whole or hurt me on the whole? How could I weigh the cardiovascular benefit of 45 minutes of exercise against the effect of sucking these particulates into my lungs for the same period of time?
I also remember flying back to Los Angeles after some trip, looking out the window as we descended, watching the brown layer covering the city, trying not to think that this brown was the soup that I normally swam in.
Levels of air pollution today
But all of that is better now, right? We’ve worked hard to clean up the air in our cities, haven’t we?
Actually, on a global scale, not much. Deaths from air pollution are declining slightly, but according to a 2019 study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) those gains have come almost completely from improvements in indoor air quality. Death rates from outdoor air pollution haven’t fallen at all.
For the greater Los Angeles region, including Pasadena where I lived, air quality has improved dramatically in the last 30 years, though the area still has some of the dirtiest air of any city in the USA, according to a 2019 study. Compared to death rates globally, though, Los Angeles and other US cities have it pretty good.
So basically, we have made a little progress, but the reality is that air pollution still exists and it kills a shocking number of people. In 2018, air pollution that came from the burning of fossil fuels killed eight million people, according to a Harvard study. In other words, air pollution from sources like coal and diesel was responsible for the deaths of about one in five people worldwide.
My friend’s disease
As I was trying to put a face to these numbers, I realized I know someone personally who has a life-threatening illness most likely due to air pollution. My friend Suzie Szalay taught English in China about 30 years ago when she was in her 30s. She lived in a Chinese city where coal smoke and dust polluted the outside air and also the air inside Suzie’s apartment where coal was used for cooking. Now she has contracted an incurable lung disease called bronchiectasis. This disease causes lungs to be susceptible to infection. As a result, Suzie spends two and a half hours a day with a nebulizer and other equipment to try to remove the fluid from her lungs. She is a remarkably energetic and determined person, so she is able to still live a productive life. But for many people who do not have the access to medical care that Suzie has, bronchiectasis is debilitating and can even lead to death. A study of 18,000 people in Asia with bronchiectasis showed that 9.2 percent died of the disease within 5.8 years.
If there’s any good news about air pollution, it’s that as countries transition away from fossil fuels toward renewable forms of energy, our air will get cleaner too.
We can hope and pray for a quick transition. Of all the bad things that are happening due to our use of fossil fuels, like heat-related hunger, water shortages, and animals going extinct, one of the worst is that many people are still dying from air pollution.