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The health benefits of better air

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Re: The health benefits of better air

#321

Post by FridayoLeary »

crazygringo wrote: post #130

This article seems to make fantastic jumps from the believable -- mortality from overall air pollution (e.g. in Delhi) to the frankly unbelievable -- your ultrasonic humidifier supposedly reducing your life by nearly an hour each night, or that a daily commute between Newark and NYC takes half a year off your life. According to this logic, anyone who works in the subway should be dying, what, 10 years earlier? Which…

a bit off topic, but i can logically guarantee you that smoking takes at least 5 minutes off your life. It takes that long to smoke a cigarette...

You have to put things into perspective, why should you care less about living now then in 40 years in the future? Chances are your quality of life will only get worse etc.

Re: The health benefits of better air

#323

Post by notahacker »

GrumpySloth wrote: post #244
darkwater wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no way an expert on the matter but by pure logic it's still amazes me how we survived (and evolved!) as a species for thousand of years without almost no shelter from direct sunlight and yet now (too much) sunlight exposure is seen as a cause of death. I know we lost almost all the body hair we used to have but still, we usually wear clothes when under the sun.

According to my naive knowledge: 1. We have more ozone holes now. 2. We weren't constantly in direct contact with sunlight. If you move past very early stages, we had shelter in forests, caves, tents, igloos. 3. When we were in direct contact with sunlight, we had a darker skin, which is more resilient to that. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Nobody counting skin cancer deaths and saying "this is completely avoidable and dying at that age is abnormal" back then either...

Re: The health benefits of better air

#326

Post by airhead969 »

FridayoLeary wrote: post #321
crazygringo wrote: post #130

This article seems to make fantastic jumps from the believable -- mortality from overall air pollution (e.g. in Delhi) to the frankly unbelievable -- your ultrasonic humidifier supposedly reducing your life by nearly an hour each night, or that a daily commute between Newark and NYC takes half a year off your life. According to this logic, anyone who works in the subway should be dying, what, 10 years earlier? Which…

a bit off topic, but i can logically guarantee you that smoking takes at least 5 minutes off your life. It takes that long to smoke a cigarette... You have to put things into perspective, why should you care less about living now then in 40 years in the future? Chances are your quality of life will only get worse etc.

Not if smokers multitask, like making your contact cleaner solution in the factory or making your delivery food.

IMO, all cigarettes should have cyanide added to them to reduce the costs to society by speeding-up the slow suicide and excess harm to others.

Re: The health benefits of better air

#327

Post by notahacker »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #300
steventharlow wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution (and survival) only cares about if you survive to reproduce. So human evolution (and survival) matters only until 14-40, and humans aren't dying of skin cancer at exceedingly large numbers at those ages. If we pushed back the reproductive age we'd eventually evolve to live longer (though would have more people dying without reproducing first). This experiment has been successfully shown in fruit flies.

> So human evolution (and survival) matters only until 14-40 Not necessarily. I'd imagine it helps the survival chances of your grandchildren if you're around when they're growing up (though it probably mattered less back when children were raised by communities than in the nuclear families we have nowadays).

Sure, it would have helped homo sapiens even more if more of their children had lived to childbearing ages (if, say, they'd discovered antibiotics a few millenia earlier or evolved more natural immunities). But the infant survival rates back then were enough to ensure the species survived, just like the smaller fraction of the population struck down by skin cancer every year wasn't enough to put evolutionary pressure on us to develop resistance to it or develop sunlight avoidance traits. Evolution doesn't guarantee that every possible beneficial adaptation takes place.

Re: The health benefits of better air

#328

Post by airhead969 »

Mauricebranagh wrote: post #291
crazygringo wrote: post #130

This article seems to make fantastic jumps from the believable -- mortality from overall air pollution (e.g. in Delhi) to the frankly unbelievable -- your ultrasonic humidifier supposedly reducing your life by nearly an hour each night, or that a daily commute between Newark and NYC takes half a year off your life. According to this logic, anyone who works in the subway should be dying, what, 10 years earlier? Which…

And in NYC and the US in general having better health care especially for poorer workers will have much more of an effect.

Completely untrue. The US spends the most per capita and gets worse outcomes than other countries. This fact was even highlighted in Michael Moore's Where To Invade Next?

Re: The health benefits of better air

#329

Post by homero »

xaduha wrote: post #308
stared wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to ultrasonic humidifiers, they do generate a lot of PM 2.5, see: https://blog.getawair.com/awair-investigates-how-your-humidi... It is NOT certain that these particles are as bad as ones from dust or combustion. All in all, when small droplets evaporate, what remains is water-soluble salts, rather than anything more reactive or harder to remove, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3922954/…

That's why you gotta use them with reverse osmosis filtered water. And not one that remineralizes, you can do that later on your own. I have a ultrasonic humidifier, reverse osmosis water filter and air quality sensor, it's all good.

I use distilled water

Re: The health benefits of better air

#330

Post by airhead969 »

kgwgk wrote: post #242
globular-toast wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> According to this logic, anyone who works in the subway should be dying, what, 10 years earlier? Which is obviously not happening. Why is this obvious?

Because you would see all the time commercials on tv letting you know that if you, or a late loved one, worked in the subway you may be entitled to financial compensation.

No. Just no. That's not how science works.
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