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/ as mentioned in https://learn.kaiterra.com/en/air-academy/humidifiers-cause-...:
"In a study on mice, researchers discovered that inhaling the dust from ultrasonic purifiers produces a cellular response, but this response lacks the inflammation and damage associated with other forms of particulate matter."
Myself, I got shocked when my air purifier suddenly started showing a huge amount of pollution (and yes, my eyes turned red). Only afterwards, I checked it was exactly because of my freshly-bought ultrasonic air purifier. Now I have an evaporative one - not as fast, not as spectacular, but better.
But both types have easy solutions to their respective problems:
- Use distilled water in the ultrasonic.
- Regularly clean/replace wick in your evaporative (or use a water stabilization agent).
Even the article at the top says they measured "0" particles when distilled water was used.
Until reading this thread I thought using distilled water in them was common knowledge. I believe that is what the manual with mine even said.
Watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHeehYYgl28
Optional follow-ups:
Works wonders, is cheap, and easy to clean. Evaporation happens for free if you let it.
Do the hospitality staff at Niagara Falls get sick more often than other people in hospitality?
This seems like a “PM2.5 bad no matter the source” theory which isn’t supported at all.
It's limescale, you don't want it in you lungs. Kidney stones also have some relation to it, probably not exactly caused by hard water, but they get their building material from somewhere.
If you are worrying about the method by which you extinguish a candle, worrying is what's going to shorten your life, not the candle.
I haven't researched that, but it always seemed entirely obvious to me that candles aren't exactly healthy in terms of air quality.
Candle emissions have a low but known impact on your health. Plug in air fresheners don't have a known impact but they have god knows what chemicals in them. Maybe you'll get cancer at 60, maybe it would take three lifetimes of exposure to have any effect.
It just seems like the road in front of my house is probably more of a problem than my vanilla candle.
I'm not sure what effect on my health a one time event like this has, but if I can avoid it I will.
I can't do anything about the pollution outside.
There's a large body of emerging science that points to inhaled particulates reducing health and lifespan.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/10/subway-a...
As for actual subway workers… I mean it’s not exactly a coal mine, but I would be pretty surprised if their mortality wasn’t at least somewhat measurably lower than, say, that of shepherds.
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.
The global ban on CFCs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol) is working, and although there are still big holes that open and close every year we're on the way to getting back to pre-1980 levels of holes by 2060. https://public.wmo.int/en/media/news/record-breaking-2020-oz...
...A recently reported slowdown in the decline of the atmospheric concentration of CFC-11 after 2012, however, suggests that global emissions have increased...
We show that emissions from eastern mainland China are 7.0 ± 3.0 (±1 standard deviation) gigagrams per year higher in 2014–2017 than in 2008–2012, and that the increase in emissions arises primarily around the northeastern provinces of Shandong and Hebei. This increase accounts for a substantial fraction (at least 40 to 60 per cent) of the global rise in CFC-11 emissions.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1193-4
Still, the Montreal Protocol is a good example of what can be achieved when we finally reach an imminent crisis.
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.
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).
Keeping toddlers from walking off a cliff (and the other things unsupervised toddlers will do to kill themselves) is probably why he said 14-40 and not 14-30.
I just don't think that's true. I think grand parents being around was important for human survival.
If it wasn't, if all that mattered was having the most kids, then why would women go through menopause? Wouldn't it be better if women continued having children until they die?
I think it makes sense that young people have kids (the sooner the better, faster evolution and less chance of DNA degradation)
Then they should live as long as possible to help raise their grandkids to ensure their genes survive.
Given that the risk of birth defects goes up significantly the older a woman is, menopause is probably evolutionarily advantageous.
Though I do want to point out that clothing doesn't protect against UV as much as you might think, and a sunburn or lack thereof doesn't tell you all that much about your UV exposure for the day. You could have exceeded your healthy exposure for the day without getting a sunburn.
As the parent said, plenty of nuance to go around.
This is why tanning studios have been banned in Australia.
I figure I was getting much more sun exposure as a kid running around in t-shirt and shorts then the local shepherds did.
One of the biggest problems I found was indoor CO2 levels. High CO2 levels (much less than dangerous CO2 levels) make you groggy, sleepy, and can induce headaches. I now get notifications to open my windows when CO2 levels pass a certain threshold.
I like that the air quality monitor enables you to figure out how much the window has to be opened and also when.
That's far more useful than the blanket advice of opening windows daily.
Just two more nuances:
1) The article is measuring loss in "DALYs" = disability-adjusted life years. 10 DALYs lost may not mean dying 10 years earlier, but could also mean suffering from Alzheimer's for 16 years (Alzheimer's has a weight of 0.66 [1]), or any combination thereof (e.g. 10 years of Alzheimer's + dying 3.3 years earlier).
2) The cited number is for the "worst offender" on the NYC metro. The pollution levels on the London underground are less than a 10th of that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability-adjusted_life_year
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index#Limitations
(however the statistics on BMI vs mortality as still completely valid)
I never said that. I said the opposite.
From my ad-hoc survey of subway driver friends, this seems about true... Most die in their late 60's in a country where most people make it to 70/80.
Obviously the fact their job involves sitting in a chair all day doesn't help things...
For $50 per carriage, dust collecting sponges, fans or filters could be fitted, but train companies don't care. By doing anything about the dust they might be opening themselves up to lawsuits claiming they didn't do enough about a risk they knew about... There are also political issues - often the train company bought the trains 50 years ago and will pay extortionate prices to the original manufacturer for any modifications, and if they make modifications themselves the manufacturer will drop all support.
Many modern trains are starting to have electric braking, and that produces far less dust.
1) Dust from brakes, as noted by other comments.
2) Tunnels, and stations in underground spaces, therefor hard to ventilate.
> I assume it's not as bad in say Hong Kong?
No idea, but air quality in the London underground is very bad indeed. I mean you can sometimes see a visible brown haze looking down the length of the platform.
https://airqualitynews.com/2019/11/29/air-pollution-on-londo...
Outdoor air quality in Hong Kong was pretty rough a few years on either side of 2014, but it has either gotten better lately or I've stopped noticing the bad days.
> ...I mean, our body requires minerals -- we're drinking them in our water all day long
Regardless of the minerals in question here, route-of-delivery is a big deal in toxicology, so the line of thinking here is a bit flawed.
These numbers are derived from estimations, for sure. But they are sophisticated estimations and serve to rank other health risks in life. In rich countries we usually obsesses about things like pesticides in food or „small particulate matter“ to an extent that it is absurd. Air quality is a real threat in many countries but not anymore in the US or most of Europe for sure.
As the article shows obesity is the killer number 1 in the US. A healthy diet is something which is totally under our control. And for sure smoke generated at a BBQ for example is not very healthy and can be avoided by using a gas grill.
These are things usually ignored and thus underestimated in our health obsession.
Couldn’t be more wrong.
As the author casually admits, we know nothing without experiments. End of story.
What makes your statement so wrong is that it takes decades for the consequences to show up, if they are measurable at all, in non experimental studies. That is exactly the same reason that cigarettes were considered safe for so long. Health consequences take decades to show up and without experiments all we get are loose correlations. Air quality in many places in America is getting worse, the size of the population in these areas is massive. To declare to potential health consequences 60 years in the future without any solid experimental evidence is the same as the doctors of the 50’s telling patients to smoke up, there’s no evidence cigarettes are bad. Exactly the same.
So, you're telling me the air quality is getting worse despite this trend not being observed, yet? There is a logical fallacy somewhere. Furthermore, the link between lung cancer and cigarette smoking was well observed already in the 50s but the tobacco industry naturally downplayed the risks.
BTW: It is an established fact that air quality in the cities of 19th century was way worse -- mainly due to the fact that people cooked and heated their places with open fires and coal. For some insight on the UK: https://theconversation.com/air-pollution-in-victorian-era-b...
Edit: To illustrate the point, assume that getting regular physical is more important now than 100 years ago, due to on average more sedentary contemporary lifestyles. Assume heavy air pollution decreases outdoor activity, which seems plausible if not certain. How long would it take for a body of scientific literature to develop to document the problem? Given measurement problems and the difficulty of doing simulation heavy research, we might never be able to prove such a linkage exists, even if it did.
I don't think you're being honest here, it obviously isn't try to make the point that each commute = 1 year, that's why it's in the "lifestyle" category and not in the "single event" one
They aren't saying one commute takes a year off the life. They're saying that people who's job is riding the public commute infrastructure spend roughly 20 times as much time breathing the air in the commuter infrastructure as people who commute to/from work, so if the effect is linear... that's roughly a 10 year reduction in lifespan.
Or, are you trying to say that some underlying common factor between commuting and home/office air quality is present, and so the commute is just a proxy for that common factor? If that's the case, if that common factor is identifiable, it should be named. If that common factor isn't identifiable, how are we confident in attributing it to air quality?
Or, are you claiming that the air quality in the commute infrastructure is the culprit, but the effect is dramatically sublinear?
As compared to an "average" US city taking off a quarter-year. I think the commuting thing is a red herring, and they just mean living/working in the NYC metro area, which as a densely populated area likely has slightly worse air than an average US location.
>According to this logic, anyone who works in the subway should be dying, what, 10 years earlier?
I don't think that's what they mean. I think it's a lifetime NYC commuter on average should live half a year less than someone out in the country.
Are you sure this isn't happening? I could easily imagine people working in dusty places for example dying earlier due to health related issues that could be traced back to the lifestyle.
> but ultrasonic humidifiers produce huge numbers of particles. They turn any minerals in the water become airborne particles. got the following steady-state increases over background levels.
> Mineral water: ~265
> Tap water (Seoul): ~260
> Purified water: ~50
> Distilled water: ~0
So what you mean is that if I follow the instructions on the manual and use distilled (or at least purified water) for mineral and biological reasons, the issue is smaller to non-existent?
Distilled water is made by steam condensation, and nearly ultra-pure but still contains dissolved gases.
DI water should be made from some distilled water to be the highest possible purity, but it's usually made from RO or simply filtered tap water.
There are some things DI can do that steam distillation can't, and vice-versa. The two processes are entirely different and NOT interchangeable.
> My home system takes 45 ppm water and reduces it to <2 ppm
My tap water is around 227 and filter is just recently installed, there's still some air in the system. I don't think it will go that low ever, but it's good enough for me. I plan to remineralize it a bit for drinking anyway, so it's all a bit moot.
On the contrary, that sounds extremely credible.
If you divide life expectancy stats just by gender and race, you already see more than 10 years difference.
Why is this obvious?
We know this?
Further down, correlation plots are shown but no analysis of potential confounders that could affect life expectancy as well, like access to medical care, education, wealth.
I do believe that breathing that fine dust isn't very healthy long term, but that article outright lies about using it = taking 50 minutes out of every 1440 minutes of everybody's lives.
We would see this effect in dusty (ie Saharan) regions already, there are hundreds of millions of people living in those conditions. What is dust if not small particles of stones and organic compounds flying around.
This is plain false.
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.
The quality of your end of life gets (on average) much worse if you smoke.
Not only do you die 5 minutes earlier, but you also spend more additional time with disease impacting your quality of life, such as COPD.
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.
Diesel vehicles are extremely hazardous causing great harm to millions but go under regulated because of money. ICEs should die.
Alcoholic drinks don't directly harm anyone else in their consumption and the QALY/micromorts involved are small.
Do you have any other rude, unscientific arguments?
Also, the suggestion to make products more deadly so that they are used less seems like bad policy. Reduction of harms usually does not mean killing the patient.
According to this logic, anyone who works in the subway should be dying, what, 10 years earlier? Which is obviously not happening.
Similarly, it seems impossible to believe that the minerals in the air from humidifiers are equivalently dangerous to factory pollution or cigarette smoke. Different categories of particles are going to affect the body differently, no? I mean, our body requires minerals -- we're drinking them in our water all day long -- while certain factories may be belching out straight-up poison.
These statistics are just not passing the smell test. They seem to be extrapolations of extrapolations of extrapolations. This article's conclusions don't seem even remotely convincing.