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- Hacker News
- live near a highway and can't afford to move, any ideas what I should doby moneywoes
- Air purifiers? Winix, Conway, IKEA etcby hexbin010
- Use an air purifier with a HEPA filter, ideally one rated for your room size. Keep windows closed during rush hour or heavy traffic timesby BrtByte
- Air purifiers are capable of removing PM2.5. Most people can get one under $150. I found that unused second-hand ones are abundant on Craigslist, eBay, etc. Get one that doesn't have ozone. I found that the Winix's ozone runs even when turning it "off".
There are reviews online that also take into account long-term cost (including the price of the filters themselves and how often they need to be replaced).
by culi - Any recommendations for a good air quality monitor?by kqr2
- “ After controlling for socioeconomic and other differences, the researchers found that the rate of Lewy body hospitalizations was 12 percent higher in U.S. counties with the worst concentrations of PM2.5 than in those with the lowest.”
Not a very powerful effect.
by encoderer - the article is clearly a fear mongering oneby xezzed
- Dementedness is higher in cities then, right?
What differences in behavior do we see between city and rural?
by analog8374 - It’s really hard to study because population is so diffuse and sometimes don’t align with geography.
My mom used to work in public health research, and one example that was hard to quantify was suspected cancer clusters around roads that were oiled gravel, where the oil was contaminated with industrial waste products. Basically, people who were outside in the summer near a road seemed to get lung cancer at higher rates due to road dust.
Issue was there just weren’t enough people or documentation of the supply chain to really prove it. They were able to stop the process of “donating” waste products to the highway departments.
In an urban environment, it’s easy. There are probably 500,000 people living along busy commercial corridors in NYC where you can reliably measure stuff like exposure to diesel particles or whatever.
by Spooky23 - Probably not true per capita. In the suburb I partially grew up with they would kidnap homeless people and bus them to the nearest city. This is quite common throughout California and many red states.
Suburbs have more cars per capita, more driving in general, more asphalt,[0] more time commuting/being on the streets to reach common destinations, more exposure to smoke from fires, and sometimes even more exposure to pollutants and pesticides from farming (especially if they have golf courses. Golf courses use about 5x more pesticides than farmland per acre). Suburbs also have more suicides per capita than cities
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
by culi - These sorts of pollution are largely caused by building massive amounts of car infrastructure and not building transit instead. The health effects extend beyond the direct pollution exposure to lifestyle things such as inactivity social isolation, and more.
And yet the US largely bans healthier, denser living by law. Density grows out of less dense areas, and those less dense areas nearly all have strict density caps preventing density, as well as road infrastructure designed to never allow density. And the dense areas of the country, which already show healthier lives for people and longer lifespans, have similarly tight caps on building more density
All this is to say that we have made a political choice as a society and are now reaping what we have sown. However we can choose something better for the future.
by epistasis - Your proposal flies in the face of what people actually want. Everyone wants a detached home with a yard. No one wants to live in a condo, an oct or a quad, or even a row house, as a permanent life-long dream. Not the people who currently own detached homes and not the people looking to buy homes. Everyone sees high-density housing as a stepping stone towards detached home ownership. Detached home ownership is the dream, the more land it comes with, the better.by glitchc
- What really stands out is how subtle the damage can be. You're not coughing or wheezing, you're just slowly accumulating risk for something that might not show up for dadesby BrtByte
- I think they have also done studies in rodents that show pm2.5 diesel particulate decreases insulin sensitivity.by mberning
- First reaction: air pollutants correlate with urban living, which correlates with access to specialized health care, which correlates with detection of dementia.by zahlman
- While urban living does correlate with better access to healthcare, it also correlates with other dementia risk factors like chronic stress, social isolationby BrtByte
- I recently found this blog post about an effective DIY air filter - explicitly filters pm2.5
https://chillphysicsenjoyer.substack.com/p/measuring-my-diy-...
I built one (< $50) and I'm pretty happy with the results. As someone with a life long sensitivity to air quality, the air definitely feels cleaner.
- You really don't need to DIY unless you really want to. My non-DIY mass produced air filter from Home Depot can filter PM2.5 too.by kccqzy
- Previous discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45157897 (129 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44846164 (124 comments)
by layer8 - > With increasing evidence that chronic exposure to PM2.5, a neurotoxin, not only damages lungs and hearts but is also associated with dementia, probably not.
PM2.5 is not a neurotoxin, that's an absurd thing to say.
It's literally any particles under a certain size. Whether it's a neurotoxin is necessarily going to depend on what the substance is made of.
Whether your PM2.5 exposure is coming from automobiles or wildfires or a factory, the potential outcomes may be different in different areas of the body. Heck, my PM2.5 meter skyrockets whenever I cook anything in a frying pan, because many of the aerosolized oil droplets are PM2.5.
by crazygringo - Yeah, very silly statement for them to write. I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised if certain pollutants in that range were proven or will be proven to be causing gradual damage to the brain but that has to be presented properly.by meowface
- On second thought, i think this is intentional. If scientists interpolate from well-chosen substances onto all Pm2.5, it should be provable that earths atomosphere is toxic beyond limits and uninhabitable. "We destroyed earth" sells well and would justify further research funding.
</tinfoil-hat>
by blueflow - 100% agree. It is super important to know the composition of the particles.
Unfortunately currently only super expensive instruments can measure this in real-time.
This is why I believe contextual information will become much more important in future.
Detect an indoor short PM2.5 spike around lunch time, probably a cooking event.
Detect medium elevated levels outdoor in a city in the morning and late afternoons, probably traffic related smoke.
I actually made a small tool to simulate different events that contain a quiz. Give it a try here [1].
[1] https://www.airgradient.com/air-quality-monitoring-toolkit/p...
by ahaucnx - I don’t know. Pm2.5 by definition doesn’t include gasses and as I understand it the issue is that the particulate matter, whatever it happens to be, gets in the bloodstream. Is there any particulate matter of that size that is not neurotoxic once it enters the bloodstream? I don’t know the answer but it seems like a legitimate question.by notmyjob
- I was initially skeptical of this claim because I’d previously learned that to cross the blood-brain barrier particles need to be ~200nm (PM2.5 = 2500nm). However, PM2.5 does seem to be an important category of particles for brain damage: somehow these particles can access the brain [1]. Obviously, yes, it depends on exactly the particle whether it will be “neurotoxic,” but generally “unnatural” particles in the brain are not going to do good things. (I am not an expert in particulates) it seems like things larger than this don’t penetrate the blood-brain barrier, so they can’t be neurotoxic. So PM2.5 is probably at an intersection of large enough to be unhealthy but small enough that the blood brain barrier doesn’t help (probably some evolutionary argument to be made here).
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9491465/#:~:text=PM...
by asgraham - This is what frustrates me the most about air pollution indexes. They all treat PM2.5 equally regardless of the source. Smoke from a wildfire in an industrial area is NOT the same as smoke from a wildfire in a woodland. Hell, even some pollen fragments can be PM2.5. Formaldehyde and benzene particulate matter should not be treated equally to pollen fragmentsby culi
- Frying pan PM2.5 is pollution, and has been linked to increased childhood asthma, on of the easier and more immediate readouts from exposure. Linking dementia to that is a far harder scientific task due to the amounts of exposure and variability over time. Here's one blog post going over some of the evidence linking gas stoves to asthma:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/have-a-gas-stove-how-to-...
by epistasis - From what I've read apparently pretty much all PM2.5 encountered by most people has neurotoxic effects.
It looks like there are a couple reasons for this.
1. There are a lot of substances that are neurotoxic. Most things that create PM2.5 pollution will involve some of them.
2. PM2.5 is good at getting to places where the body really doesn't like foreign objects and so the mere presence of PM2.5 particles can trigger responses, such as inflammation, that can cause neurological damage even if the particle itself is made of a normally non-toxic substance.
by tzs - by mackeye