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Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone

bbc.com

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Re: Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone

#181

Post by pcrh »

Link to the original study below, free to access [0]. The key data appear to be this:

>At baseline, 184 (14%) of 1280 children with successful FEV1 measurement in London had a clinically low FEV1 (pre-bronchodilator FEV1 So the proportion of children with low lung function dropped from 14% to 9% in London, and from 9% to 7% at the comparator site in Luton. It's not that much different, though any improvement is obviously welcome.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2...

Re: Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone

#182

Post by victorbjorklund »

mrob wrote: post #114
Aurornis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living very close to busy highways is known to generate poor air quality. I recommend anyone in those locations buy an air purifier for their kids' rooms. I bought a couple reasonably priced HEPA purifiers and I change the filters on schedule. Replacement HEPA filters are very cheap. Also watch out for things that we do indoors that can generate bad air quality. I had a friend who bought a VOC meter and noticed very…

HEPA filters are counterproductive in standard air purifiers. Air purifiers pump their cleaned air directly into the dirty air of the room. It doesn't matter if that cleaned air is extremely clean, because it's immediately mixed with dirty air. What actually matters is how much clean air you produce: the "clean air delivery rate" (CADR). The more effective the filter the more it restricts airflow. If a filter is only…

What you wanna say is it might be more efficient with more CADR per minute with less filtration than less CADR an a higher filtration.

But a HEPA filter is better than no filter. Even if would be more effective with another.

(Also depends on size of hepa filter and room to clean. Large enough filter and small enough space and Hepa can clean all the air)

Re: Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone

#183

Post by pasc1878 »

mk89 wrote: post #173
ecshafer wrote: post #3

Anecdata I was living very close to a busy highway, and my young daughter was wheazing when she had a cold, we had to give her medicine via a nebulizer. When we moved out to the country more, far away from any major roads, these issues all disappeared within a couple months.

I don't understand why we keep on building right next to highways which are some of the worst things for our health. You don't need to live in the countryside for that. Just stay roughly 1km away from them and the situation is significantly better. There is evidence of a lot of ugly diseases caused by this, without even mentioning the constant 40+ dB background noise.

In London that is difficult – there is not a lot of space.

Plus the idea of having everything within a 15 minute walk including access to public transport.

Re: Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone

#184

Post by victorbjorklund »

Sha1rholder wrote: post #65
energy123 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good start, but for VOCs and gases you'll need activated carbon. Those 2-in-1 filters do exist but cost more. And many are scams because they don't have enough volume of activated carbon.

Why would they cut corners? Activated carbon isn’t expensive.

You have companies choosing the component that cost 10 cents instead of 15 cents even if the 10 cents component will break 10 times faster than the more expensive one.

Re: Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone

#185

Post by ben_w »

marliechiller wrote: post #142
theplumber wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember I’ve read somewhere that jogging is actually net harmful for health in the city due the air pollution.

Shame you cant remember the source. Ive long since wondered if its actually more deleterious for my health to cycle to work in London due to air quality. I came to the conclusion that youre damned if you do and damned if you dont in the end, as in London at least, many of the tube lines have particulates higher than is considered safe

Probably depends on the tube line; one of them, can't remember which now as I left the country in 2018, left me with black snot on each use. Cycling wasn't that bad, but neither were the other lines.

Re: Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone

#186

Post by mschuster91 »

Retric wrote: post #74
Sha1rholder wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they cut corners? Activated carbon isn’t expensive.

Because it’s not obvious to most customers that a corner’s been cut. Same reason most new construction in the US sucks. You can safely put a washer and dryer on the upper floor of a house if you add a proper floor drain, but you’re unlikely to see anyone add a floor drain in new construction because buyers aren’t looking for it. Now multiply that by everything a buyer isn’t looking for and you’re talking real money.

> You can safely put a washer and dryer on the upper floor of a house if you add a proper floor drain

European here, we've always been placing washer/dryer stacks in our bathrooms without needing floor drains. We have machines with a system called Aquastop [1] that stop the water flow if the machine detects a leak inside the system.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquastop

Re: Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone

#187

Post by picture »

swiftcoder wrote: post #163
patrickk wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re so inclined, you can build your own air purifier with laser cut panels or 3d printed panels and use a cheap ikea air filter and standard PC fans. All the parts are readily available, and user repairable. If you pair if with an Apollo AIR-1 you can have home assistant ramp up and down the fans with a PC fan controller based on live readings of PM2.5 in your home. I did this with the help of Claude code. http…

I really wish the DIY folks would measure the airflow and sound levels on this sort of thing. CADR and decibels are going to vary wildly with fan choice

I came across this site which has pretty comprehensive data about PQ curves (the chart for determining CADR given filter impedance) at different noise and power levels: https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/204/ (many other fans tested as well but I've been liking the value of P14 Pro PST)

However they look somewhat commercial and I'm not sure the funding/incentives so definitely corroborate with other sources.

Re: Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone

#188

Post by ben_w »

lazide wrote: post #137
alex0015 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent and thread seemed to be arguing that low cost housing was intentionally built in places that disadvantaged the people who lived there.

Or, the only places to build houses with reasonable costs are in areas that weren’t already built out with very expensive houses. Which will tend to be less desirable areas, by definition. One approach, of course, would be to also make existing houses less expensive/desirable. Notably, wealthy people tend to have the resources to fight efforts to do that.

The other approach is to expand what land is available to build on. I understand that in the UK, farmers consider it a lottery win if they get planning permission for some of their farmland to become housing.

Despite what many in the UK think about it "being full", this is mostly an illusion from how cramped are the parts in which the houses are allowed to go; the country as a whole is mostly undeveloped.

(There are of course other considerations, with "why did you build on a flood plain?" being one of the failure modes in the UK).

Re: Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone

#189

Post by ZeroGravitas »

XorNot wrote: post #5

So punchline, probably a good idea to electrify all the cars yeah?

Yes, and...

In some areas of London the ULEZ has been so successful that the measured NOx is now coming mostly from gas boilers used for heating, probably mostly old large commerical units.

So shifting from gas boilers to heat pumps and from gas ovens and stoves to electric/indusction is also beneficial.

Re: Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone

#190

Post by aitchnyu »

nathancahill wrote: post #13
ecshafer wrote: post #3

Anecdata I was living very close to a busy highway, and my young daughter was wheazing when she had a cold, we had to give her medicine via a nebulizer. When we moved out to the country more, far away from any major roads, these issues all disappeared within a couple months.

Doctors used to prescribe a "change of air" in the 18-19th centuries. Maybe they still should.

I wanted to long for the time when people hated "Malaria" and wanted to move to "Beunos Aires". But they believed the arrows chase us at daytime and the plague engulf us at night, like in the Psalm.
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