Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/sep/10/cancer-breakthrough-is-a-wake-up-call-on-danger-of-air-pollution

by hammock • 4 years ago

196 100 4 years ago

hammock3• 4 years ago

I wanted to find an account of what the biggest sources of PM2.5 are in the US. This article discusses traffic fumes (24% of PM2.5), but I was surprised to learn that by far, the largest source of PM2.5 - 45% - is “unspecified sources of human origin.”

Where does that stuff come from? Well, it’s created in the atmosphere via secondary reactions between agricultural NH3 emissions, SO2 and NOx emissions from shipping and industrial activities and power generation, and NMVOCs from industrial processes and consumption of solvents.[1]

Those reactions seem like an interesting area of study and those chemicals involved are far less-often discussed as sources of air pollution even though they seem to combine to form the biggest source

[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223101...

zibby8• 4 years ago

I wonder how important the raw amount of emissions is. Density should decrease at a cubic rate of distance, so being close to a small source of emissions might be worse than being somewhat far from a heavier source.

projectramo• 4 years ago

See for yourself.

Propublica plotted a "cancer map" of elevated cancer risks, and you can see how it drops off as you go away from certain points.

https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/

treis2• 4 years ago

It's pretty hard to separate correlation from causation. There's way more sources of carcinogens than just car generated pollution. And lots of them will tend to correlate with poverty/working class which will tend to correlate with living next to highways.

rufius• 4 years ago

The other thing people don’t often talk of is PM2.5 inside their home while cooking. Lot of people have poor ventilation or insufficient air movement capacity in their kitchens.

mavhc• 4 years ago

From the food, or the fuel?

micromacrofoot2• 4 years ago

Getting an air quality monitor during covid really blew my mind when I saw the amount cooking pollution and how long it can linger. No one should be cooking inside without a vent running or a window open.

tristor2• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, this is not simple to rectify. My previous house was expensive and difficult to retrofit to have an externally vented range hood, and I'm renting now, where basically nothing has externally vented range hoods, and looking to buy a place that does. This is a hard non-negotiable requirement for my next house, but the pickings are very slim. This is a severe issue (in the US anyway), and it's difficult to retrofit for most kitchens since most houses in the US are designed with the stove on the interior wall rather than the exterior wall.

Cooking fumes are the primary pollutant in my life, and honestly is one that I struggle with since I have severe asthma but love to cook. I do what I can, but this is something I wish was taken more seriously in society because there's a huge economic hill to climb to solve it yourself vs having to deal with what's available on market.

ParksNet• 4 years ago

The typical American kitchen doesn't exhaust cooking fumes out of the house - the rangehood (typically part of the microwave) just sucks the fumes up and blows them over the head of the cooker, distributing food particles and steam around the entire house (perfect for mold growth!).

It blew my mind seeing this as an Australian, where externally venting fans are standard.

killjoywashere2• 4 years ago

Before getting too excited about the experimental prevention they used, IL-1B blockade, let me say that blocking the innate immune system to prevent cancer seems ill-advised. The innate immune system is with us for very good reasons. This would be roughly equivalent to preventing table saw accidents by prophylactically removing all fingers.

Yes, table saw accidents are terrible, but there is a straightforward electromechanical solution (SawStop), and fingers are useful for many other things.

Yes, lung cancer is terrible, but there is a straightforward electromechanical solution (energy from renewables + nuclear), and the innate immune system is useful for many other things.

sdenton42• 4 years ago

Well I read the article and got excited about eliminating internal combustion engines...

capitainenemo3• 4 years ago

https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/business/145130/fine-part...

That won't necessarily solve this problem.

[edit] One more source. There are tons though. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/4a4dc6ca-en/index.html?i...

marricks• 4 years ago

Yeah, it feels like society loves coming up with ways to “handle” problems but never actual solve them.

The future will likely be upper middle class folks walking around in habitat bubbles with VR suits across a toxic desert of miasma.

FollowingTheDao• 4 years ago

We seem to be getting a lot of "wake up calls" but no one ever seems to answer the god damn phone.

dylan6042• 4 years ago

Seeing how a large portion of the population have never used a wake up call as a service, they just think it is some rude telemarketer calling that just gets added to the block list. Problem solved

CodeWriter23• 4 years ago

Didn’t we know this in the 1970’s?

the_af• 4 years ago

The news here is not that air pollution is linked to cancer, but about what the underlying mechanism could be:

"However, the biological basis for how air pollution causes cancer has remained unclear. Unlike smoking or sun exposure, which directly cause DNA mutations linked to lung and skin cancer, air pollution does not cause cancer by triggering such genetic changes."

Gatsky• 4 years ago

Yeah, PM2.5 is listed as a known carcinogen, and there is strong epidemiological data supporting the link between respiratory tract cancers and pollution.

This work provides a mechanism for how this happens, where air pollution promotes the transition of cells into a malignant state, without directly damaging DNA.

hammock3• 4 years ago

Yes. At some point though we stopped caring, and moved onto different “pollutants”

dennis_jeeves1• 4 years ago

Yes, but only the older people who have good memory, or the young people who bothered to keep themselves informed by reading some 'history' or talking to smart older people.

randcraw• 4 years ago

I know essentially nothing about this topic, but it seems likely that some particles are more dangerous than others (though I've seen no suggestion of that). I'd prefer to go after the elephants in the room before the hamsters.

There are MULTITUDES of particles in circulation everywhere everyday. If the impact of only some these are especially dire, we should be able to triage each particle simply by: 1) looking at who suffers most from 'lung cancer of unknown etiology' and what environmental particles they were exposed to, and to a lesser extent, 2) looking at who is exposed to each type of particle and whether they suffer from it.

It'd be nice if we had some clear hypotheses in mind before charging off in all directions.

dec0dedab0de• 4 years ago

One thing that shocked me about cancer treatment is how little they asked me about environmental factors. I assumed there would be questionnaires asking about all kinds of specific products and foods, maybe even asking for soil and water samples from my home. But there was none of that, and this was a major research hospital. The only thing was that they asked permission to use my biopsy for additional research.

I know the data would be messy, and if released to the wild it could lead to sensational news stories that affect the sock market, but surely there is some value in collecting up all this data? How long did it take for glyphosate to be linked to cancer? How much sooner could it have been caught?

ashtonbaker• 4 years ago

There is the NHANES dataset, which has a ton of blood/urine test data for various environmental contaminants, along with tons of other data columns like cancer diagnoses, age of onset, etc.

hackerlight• 4 years ago

Will wearing N95 masks when near busy roads help at all?

hammock3• 4 years ago

Yes. When I lived in a drafty street level apartment in SF on Oak St (busy artery) I would have to wipe my inside window sills 1-2x a week of the brake dust and black rubber particles that would accumulate

hellohowareu• 4 years ago

Same here— in the east bay (Milpitas). I was alarmed by how much silt built up on any outdoor surface. I assumed it was due to nearby highways and busy roads. Left that living situation after 2-3 months due to the concern.

briefcomment• 4 years ago

Wow. Did you feel any ill effects? Did you recover when you moved?

yamtaddle• 4 years ago

Similar things happen in the country, but it's dust from gravel roads, and/or from farming (discers, plows, combines, and so on). House can be 100 meters from the road and you still get tons of gravel road dust. Though, perhaps, that's not as bad for you as brake dust. In some corn towns it "snows" crap from the processing plants for part of the year. Can't imagine that's good for the lungs.

ajnin• 4 years ago

Are all PM2.5 equal ? It seems weird to me to lump into one category various things like car exhaust, wood fires or agricultural emissions.

viktorcode2• 4 years ago

“The risk of lung cancer from air pollution is lower than from smoking, but we have no control over what we all breathe,”

We do, to a degree. If you have air purifiers at home that does help. I can’t recommend them enough.

kwhitefoot• 4 years ago

If you have air purifiers at home that does help.

Does it? Or does merely having them make you feel more comfortable. Anyway it also means that I would have to live in a tightly sealed building, but I rather like having the window open.

viktorcode2• 4 years ago

They do clean harmful particles from the air, thus providing benefit. Just turn it on after you closed the window.

EricE• 4 years ago

Is it really the cars that are the problem - or just a high concentration of particles in the air from having so many people and things jammed in a tight space?

Dense cities themselves are the real problem. I have started carrying portable air sensors around (they are surprisingly cheap and measure a wide variety of things from particles to VOCs and CO2) and simply not being in or near a large city dramatically improves air quality. But hey, lump everything in and bash cars while you are at it - double bonus :p

asdff• 4 years ago

Remember when the pandemic first started and literally no one was on the roads? I hiked up into the mountains of LA. You could see to long beach and even catalina clear as can be, 50 mile visibility. It stayed like that until traffic started kicking back up again. The same dense city, the only difference was people weren't driving to work and the air was noticeably clearer both to the naked eye, and on purple air.

EVs will help some but honestly these days, a lot of particulate pollution cars put out comes from sources like the tires and brake dust. EVs are heavier vehicles overall and would produce more of both for a given class of vehicle. The best thing to do would be to improve service quality of bus transit in order to move more people with fewer vehicles; giving busses signal preemtion and their own lanes would go a long way to make them more convenient than cars for more people. Bike lane networks would also help people feel more confident riding a bike in cities to more places. Not enough people take the lane while biking, certainly.

HereIGoAgain• 4 years ago

Yeah, it would be much better if we focused on actually curing and treating it... at least in terms of whether we need to redesign our entire society.

Also put another way:

Oh yay.. more anti-car/mobility propaganda.

_yasmeen2• 4 years ago

That's exactly what it is. :)

_yasmeen2• 4 years ago

Climate change propaganda. I know this, because I am in the healthcare industry. No breakthrough happens by changing environments, only by figuring out interventions.

Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution

Related Stories