Definitely a problem where I live east of the Cascades in Oregon. We usually have a 'smoke season' towards the end of the summer and while the temperature and humidity are perfect for being outdoors, it's not healthy to be outside.
I fled the 2018 Camp Fire for a few months and returned to the Chico metro area only to have to move again because of combination of increasing insurance rates, unreliable electricity thanks to PG&E "PSPSes", and recurrent smoke from additional nearby forest fires. The AQI was 500-1000 for weeks at a time.
Now after moving around the 100th meridian west far from forested areas, I have a BlueAir 680i churning away constantly and 4 large HVAC intake registers with high but sensible MERV rating filters to keep indoor air quality roughly 0 PM1/PM2.5/PM10 as per multiple types of AQMs with different grades of sensors. Absolutely no problem with allergies, until I go outside. :D
Ozone is one thing I do worry about, but it's less where I live now, but GAC filter media keeps it in check.
The author’s book The Light Eaters on plant intelligence is also well worth a read! Finished it a couple months ago and it was one of my favorite books this year.
Yeah, wildfire smoke plus the lung damage from "normal" smoking and vaping plus the lung damage from Covid... that's going to utterly wreck most of our healthcare system. And not just because of cancer (which can be incredibly expensive to treat), but because of the followup effects. I recently had the misfortune of having to undergo a lung function test three weeks after a regular cold - I had lung volume/exhalation speed values of a 60 year old, at 34 years of age!
And with such values, it's hard to do sports or shay in shape generally... which has followup effects on obesity rates and with that, diabetes and a host of other effects. Maybe Ozempic can help out a bit on that front, but my hopes ain't high.
> I had lung volume/exhalation speed values of a 60 year old, at 34 years of age!
I’m sorry for your condition, but this is not a widespread trend.
At 34 years old you’re young enough that your old adult years came after the Clean Indoor Air Act. It’s hard to believe, but for generations older than ours it was not uncommon for indoor areas like bars and other venues to be filled with cigarette smoke in ways that was hard to avoid.
Even wildfire smoke is not hard to avoid for those who don’t have to work outside. Indoor HEPA air filtration units are far more accessible and commonplace now. They’re very popular in areas impacted by wildfires.
Yea, for lung health, I’ve lived through the 70s and 80s and world never go back. Remember when airplanes had smoking and non-smoking sections? It was ridiculous!
I live in a region with a very severe air pollution problem -- the worst day you remember is nothing compared to the typical winter day here, trust me on this. 200 µg/m³ of PM2.5 is a pretty average winter day, and in evenings it goes up to 1000 µg/m³, and sometimes even higher.
(The yearly average WHO recommendation for PM2.5 is no more than 5 µg/m³; in my neighbourhood the yearly average is around 150 µg/m³).
There are also high levels of chemical gaseous pollutants which nobody has bothered to measure properly over the past decade -- last time the gas monitoring worked at all, it showed persistent levels of 120-200 µg/m³ of NO₂ and 200-800 µg/m³ of SO₂, among many other pollutants (there are definitely high levels of at least H₂S, HCl, Cl, and HF).
In the warm period (which is short -- no longer than 4 months per year) it's much better, although chemical pollutants caused by heavy industry are very high all year round.
Yes, everybody has sore throats all the time, you often hear coughing even if nobody around you is sick, and I curse my fate for being born to this every single day. Yet the average life expectancy is "only" 10 years shorter compared to rich Western countries, and we have so many other problems (like high levels of smoking, high alcohol consumption, high levels of saturated animal fat in historically popular home foods, etc) that I very much doubt removing air pollution will improve it by much.
We definitely have never seen any healthcare system collapse or anything like that, and our COVID situation also wasn't any worse than anywhere else. I personally don't know anyone who suffered any noticeable long-term effects.
In the early days of the pandemic it was widely reported (erroneously) that tobacco smoking was protective against SARS-CoV-2. I don't know if OP was thinking along such lines, but it would be understandable if they were.
When we’d go on long driving trips, my dad used to smoke a pack every two hours and would stop me from rolling down my window because it was too cold outside. So my brother and I had to endure a 4 hour-long cigarette hotboxing session just to get to Upstate New York.
Compared to that, outdoor air quality these days is wonderful!
Compared to indoors, outdoors is also the only source of clean air that exists for the average person (I know, AC exists, but it is just a cludge to filter outdoors air).
We should stop accepting the destruction of our living conditions for profit as if it was a natural disaster over which we have no control.
The thing is, in the past these people just died. Today we can (and ethically, have to) keep them alive... which means our healthcare system is headed straight for collapse. Not to mention the pension system.
We're rapidly entering a demographic area where we have more people alive but unable to work due to old age, with a plethora of preventable health issues and nowhere near enough working people to care for them.
It does not follow that a larger aging population means that the healthcare system must collapse as a result. Japan has been dealing with this issue for decades and notably their healthcare system has not collapsed
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan
Can healthcare in the US be fixed or must it collapse so we can start from zero? We have mandated the middleman and required insurance, we can't have healthcare without affecting all those people and businesses in the health insurance field.
[0] - https://web.archive.org/web/20250629175151/https://www.theat...
Couldn’t read it on archive.org for some reason so I am adding this link for others in case they can’t either.
https://archive.is/JOjbN
Definitely a problem where I live east of the Cascades in Oregon. We usually have a 'smoke season' towards the end of the summer and while the temperature and humidity are perfect for being outdoors, it's not healthy to be outside.
I fled the 2018 Camp Fire for a few months and returned to the Chico metro area only to have to move again because of combination of increasing insurance rates, unreliable electricity thanks to PG&E "PSPSes", and recurrent smoke from additional nearby forest fires. The AQI was 500-1000 for weeks at a time.
Now after moving around the 100th meridian west far from forested areas, I have a BlueAir 680i churning away constantly and 4 large HVAC intake registers with high but sensible MERV rating filters to keep indoor air quality roughly 0 PM1/PM2.5/PM10 as per multiple types of AQMs with different grades of sensors. Absolutely no problem with allergies, until I go outside. :D
Ozone is one thing I do worry about, but it's less where I live now, but GAC filter media keeps it in check.
The author’s book The Light Eaters on plant intelligence is also well worth a read! Finished it a couple months ago and it was one of my favorite books this year.
Yeah, wildfire smoke plus the lung damage from "normal" smoking and vaping plus the lung damage from Covid... that's going to utterly wreck most of our healthcare system. And not just because of cancer (which can be incredibly expensive to treat), but because of the followup effects. I recently had the misfortune of having to undergo a lung function test three weeks after a regular cold - I had lung volume/exhalation speed values of a 60 year old, at 34 years of age!
And with such values, it's hard to do sports or shay in shape generally... which has followup effects on obesity rates and with that, diabetes and a host of other effects. Maybe Ozempic can help out a bit on that front, but my hopes ain't high.
> I had lung volume/exhalation speed values of a 60 year old, at 34 years of age!
I’m sorry for your condition, but this is not a widespread trend.
At 34 years old you’re young enough that your old adult years came after the Clean Indoor Air Act. It’s hard to believe, but for generations older than ours it was not uncommon for indoor areas like bars and other venues to be filled with cigarette smoke in ways that was hard to avoid.
Even wildfire smoke is not hard to avoid for those who don’t have to work outside. Indoor HEPA air filtration units are far more accessible and commonplace now. They’re very popular in areas impacted by wildfires.
Yea, for lung health, I’ve lived through the 70s and 80s and world never go back. Remember when airplanes had smoking and non-smoking sections? It was ridiculous!
i’m sure this wasn’t what you intended, but it reads as if you’re saying:
> stop being hysterical just because you can’t breathe outdoor air. just build an indoor air filtration system.
You'll be relatively fine, stop panicking.
I live in a region with a very severe air pollution problem -- the worst day you remember is nothing compared to the typical winter day here, trust me on this. 200 µg/m³ of PM2.5 is a pretty average winter day, and in evenings it goes up to 1000 µg/m³, and sometimes even higher.
(The yearly average WHO recommendation for PM2.5 is no more than 5 µg/m³; in my neighbourhood the yearly average is around 150 µg/m³).
There are also high levels of chemical gaseous pollutants which nobody has bothered to measure properly over the past decade -- last time the gas monitoring worked at all, it showed persistent levels of 120-200 µg/m³ of NO₂ and 200-800 µg/m³ of SO₂, among many other pollutants (there are definitely high levels of at least H₂S, HCl, Cl, and HF).
In the warm period (which is short -- no longer than 4 months per year) it's much better, although chemical pollutants caused by heavy industry are very high all year round.
Yes, everybody has sore throats all the time, you often hear coughing even if nobody around you is sick, and I curse my fate for being born to this every single day. Yet the average life expectancy is "only" 10 years shorter compared to rich Western countries, and we have so many other problems (like high levels of smoking, high alcohol consumption, high levels of saturated animal fat in historically popular home foods, etc) that I very much doubt removing air pollution will improve it by much.
We definitely have never seen any healthcare system collapse or anything like that, and our COVID situation also wasn't any worse than anywhere else. I personally don't know anyone who suffered any noticeable long-term effects.
Perhaps the saturation level of your area’s pollution in lungs and other body parts inhibits the ability for COVIDs effects to materialize
Are you being serious?
In the early days of the pandemic it was widely reported (erroneously) that tobacco smoking was protective against SARS-CoV-2. I don't know if OP was thinking along such lines, but it would be understandable if they were.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41533-021-00223-1
If this paper is true there’s an extra disease wrinkle - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438942...
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It’s quite callous to tell someone who is having breathing issues to “relax, most people will be fine.”
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You sound like my dad when I was a kid and I'd bring up second hand smoking effects from him on me.
When we’d go on long driving trips, my dad used to smoke a pack every two hours and would stop me from rolling down my window because it was too cold outside. So my brother and I had to endure a 4 hour-long cigarette hotboxing session just to get to Upstate New York.
Compared to that, outdoor air quality these days is wonderful!
Compared to indoors, outdoors is also the only source of clean air that exists for the average person (I know, AC exists, but it is just a cludge to filter outdoors air).
We should stop accepting the destruction of our living conditions for profit as if it was a natural disaster over which we have no control.
The thing is, in the past these people just died. Today we can (and ethically, have to) keep them alive... which means our healthcare system is headed straight for collapse. Not to mention the pension system.
We're rapidly entering a demographic area where we have more people alive but unable to work due to old age, with a plethora of preventable health issues and nowhere near enough working people to care for them.
It does not follow that a larger aging population means that the healthcare system must collapse as a result. Japan has been dealing with this issue for decades and notably their healthcare system has not collapsed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan
Japanese people are, on average, much healthier than Americans for their age.
Can healthcare in the US be fixed or must it collapse so we can start from zero? We have mandated the middleman and required insurance, we can't have healthcare without affecting all those people and businesses in the health insurance field.
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