High Levels of Air Pollution Linked to Deteriorating Lung Health

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Respro® UK Ltd

A new study has revealed a link between air pollution and deteriorating lung health in adult European citizens.

Researchers found that children growing up in areas with higher levels of pollution will have lower levels of lung function and a higher risk of developing symptoms such as cough and bronchitis symptoms. They identified that people suffering from obesity are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of air pollution, possibly due to an increased risk of lung inflammation.

“The findings of this project are crucial as they demonstrate that air pollution is having a negative effect, not only on children as previously demonstrated, but also into adulthood,” Nicole Probst-Hensch, senior author of the study, said in a statement. “Although the levels we see in Europe are much lower than in the so-called megacities in China and India, we are still seeing a deterioration of lung function in people exposed to higher levels of air pollution and this must be addressed.”

Researchers said large proportion of Europe’s population  live in areas with levels of air quality that are known to have negative impacts on health. Earlier this year, the WHO estimated that air pollution was the cause of seven million premature deaths in 2012, with 3.7 million of these being connected with poor outdoor air quality.

“The findings of this study demonstrate the importance of educating about clean air and the negative effects of air pollution. Urgent action is needed to tackle air pollution in Europe,” Professor Peter Barnes, president of the European Respiratory Society, said in a statement. “It is crucial that policymakers in Europe take note of these findings and update guidelines in Member States to meet the WHO recommended air quality standards. This will ensure equal protection of all citizens’ health across the continent.”

via High Levels of Air Pollution Linked to Deteriorating Lung Health : News : University Herald.

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Cut air pollution in half by taking road less travelled

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Respro® UK Ltd

Commuters could cut their air pollution intake in half simply by using the side streets in major cities rather than main roads, a scientist has claimed. Dr Rossa Brugha, a paediatrician and pollution researcher at Queen Mary, University of London, discovered that walkers can make small adjustments to their route which could have major benefits on their health.

Long-term exposure to air pollution contributes to around 28,000 deaths each year, government figures suggest.   The most recent statistics from Public Health England PHE suggest that 5.3 per cent of all deaths in over-25s are linked to air pollution, but that leaps to 8.3 per cent in inner London.

However Dr Brugha found that pollution, primarily caused by traffic, falls off rapidly just a few metres away from main roads.

He tested the theory while walking the two miles between Waterloo Station in London and the British Library, and found that by switching to side streets, the recorded level of air pollution he experienced fell by half.

“The most important thing is being away from the traffic,” he said.

“If you are walking home from work at rush hour or when you’re walking to your office in the morning, veer off into the side streets and the air will be cleaner.

“You can cut air pollution by half by going a different route, which will have incremental health benefits.”

Dr Brugha claims that pollution in cities can be the equivalent of smoking half a cigarette per day and is particularly damaging for children, because their lungs are still developing.

He advises parents to look carefully at routes to school to avoid the busiest roads.

“Children get one third of pollution from their route to school so parents can help their children by trying to find a better route, which takes them away from the traffic.”

Dr Brugha will be presenting findings at the British Science Festival in Birmingham next week.

via Cut air pollution in half by taking road less travelled – Telegraph.

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Pearl River Delta governments axe cross-border air quality index

Posted on September 5, 2014 by Respro® UK Ltd

Governments in the Pearl River Delta area have axed the decade-old regional air-quality index in favour of an online platform offering pollutant concentration readings that has been criticised as hard to understand.

The Environmental Protection Department announced the change in a press release yesterday after the environmental chiefs of Macau, Guangdong and Hong Kong signed an agreement on so-called “regional air-pollution control and prevention”.

The three governments agreed to do away with the index and a related map that used different colours to grade air quality across the region – a system in use since 2005 to monitor changes in air quality after a 2002 cross-border pact to reduce emissions.

After the termination of that index, there will no longer be a single yardstick covering the whole region. Rather, three different air-pollution indices and alert systems will now operate separately in Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macau.

The EPD hailed the new agreement as progress, with hourly updates of pollution readings at 23 locations in the region, including the newcomer Macau, via an online platform managed by the Guangdong authority.

The platform displays a map of the region, with the hourly concentration levels of six pollutants, such as ozone and fine particles, shown at each of the 23 selected monitoring locations: four in Hong Kong, one in Macau and the rest scattered around the Pearl River Delta.

However, Guangdong’s environmental protection bureau already releases hourly updates of air-quality data on its website (and has since 2012), covering 111 locations in the province and the same range of air pollutants.

Dr Cheng Luk-ki, the scientific and conservation head of the advocacy group Green Power, criticised the change as “a step backward” and a “loss of a common language in air pollution”.

He said that while the old index was compiled based on the national air-quality standards, it at least offered the readers clarity and meaningful comparisons of air-quality measurements across the region.

“The public will now find it hard to understand the meaning behind those pollution readings, without a simple index to explain the impacts,” he said.

He said the online platform was already redundant, as it made more sense for people to go directly to the air-quality index offered by their own local environmental authority.

Professor Wong Tze-wai, an air-pollution expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who helped devise the city’s new air-quality health index, said neither an “oversimplified index” nor “complicated pollution readings” would be meaningful to the public.

He said it would be beneficial if the air-quality indices between Hong Kong and the mainland could be unified, but he believed that would be a time-consuming process with many technical problems that would have to be overcome.

Hong Kong now employs an alert system that gives air-quality information by neighbourhood on a scale of one to 11, displaying the health risk associated with each reading.

Macau and Guangdong, meanwhile, use conventional air-quality index systems that express pollution as one of six grades, with scales from 0 to 500 and from 0 to more than 300.

via Pearl River Delta governments axe cross-border air quality index | South China Morning Post.

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Respro® Masks FAQ: Can the mask be washed?

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Respro® UK Ltd

Can the mask be washed?

It is recommended that you wash the neoprene shell of the mask every month under normal use. To do this it is necessary to remove the filter and the valve first. Although spare valves and filters are available from your retailer, please be careful not to misplace any of the components during maintenance.

Place the filter and valves in a pan of freshly boiled water (remove pan from heat source before putting filter in) and let it cool down. Remove filter unit and allow to stand dry.

This will remove facial oils that may build up over a period of continuous use and ensure that it is hygienically clean. This procedure will also remove some of the particulates and organic vapour that will be present within the Charcoal structure of the filter or tissue salt build in the valves.

If the mask cover (shell) requires washing this should be done by carefully removing the filter assembly and then washing it in warm soapy water and then left to dry naturally.

For more FAQ,  see Respro® Mask FAQ or visit our YouTube channel youtube.com/ResproMasks

All Respro® products are available from our website respro.com

Respro® will ship your order to anywhere on the planet free of charge.

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Missouri regulators approve change in air pollution fees

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Respro® UK Ltd

An increase in the fees paid by Missouri’s polluters is set to take effect by January 2016.

The Missouri Air Conservation Commission voted Tuesday to proceed with the new fees after Missouri Department of Natural Resources staff spent the summer working with affected industries to devise a new fee structure that would keep its air pollution program solvent.

The proposal would charge industry $48 per emitted ton of sulfur oxides, nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter and other pollutants. That would be up from $40 per ton, and fees will remain capped at 4,000 tons per pollutant and 12,000 tons in all.

The proposal is expected to raise about $1 million more per year, but it still must go through a formal state rulemaking and, in addition, is subject to review from the Legislature.

It’s a scaled-back version of an earlier proposal that would have also raised some permit review fees. However, the special fee adjustment process requires “substantial agreement” with affected companies, and staff at the DNR said last month that some opposition arose late in the process. DNR administrators have not said who opposed the increases.

Most industries that participated through the summer supported the proposal. Last month, some said that raising only emission fees wasn’t fair and that they would like to see permit fees raised, too. If the DNR’s air program cannot meet minimum standards, the Environmental Protection Agency could step in to do the job.

The state air pollution program still faces tight budgets even with the increase, but administrators say it should be able to remain solvent beyond 2016, when it originally projected it would run out of money without an increase in years-old air pollution fees.

It plans to again ask the companies it regulates for permit fee increases beginning next year.

via Missouri regulators approve change in air pollution fees : Business.

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Air Pollution and Extreme Weather Combine to Kill

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Respro® UK Ltd

Particulates, ozone and smog coupled with extreme temperatures form a more dangerous health threat than these problems would be individually, researchers have found.

The combined threat is apparent in both hot and cold ends of the temperature spectrum.

Scientists have long understood that air pollution is a serious health threat. The World Health Organization reported that in 2012, 1 in 8 deaths worldwide stemmed from air pollution.

These concerns were the foundation of sweeping legislation like the Clean Air Act, the same law under which the Obama administration is seeking to limit greenhouse gas emissions (ClimateWire, June 3).

President Obama argued that air pollution and carbon dioxide often come from the same sources, so cutting carbon yields health benefits in the near term.

Extreme temperatures also have a known risk profile, leading to more hospital visits from asthma and heat attacks. As the climate changes, heat waves are poised to grow more severe and frequent. These risks will increase as people move to urban areas, which generally warm faster than their surroundings.

However, researchers are still mapping out the combined effects of air quality and climate.

“Most studies focus on one or the other,” said Alexandra Schneider, a senior scientist and team leader at Helmholtz Zentrum München, a federal health research institution in Germany.

Heart failure linked to temperature spikes
Schneider and her collaborators published two studies this year, one in the journal Heart examining short-term temperature changes and heart health, and another paper published in Science of the Total Environment looking at how pollution and temperature influence health risk.

In both reports, the researchers looked at public health data from three cities in southern Germany—Nuremberg, Munich and Augsburg—between 1990 and 2006. These cities have a temperate climate year-round, and few homes in the region have air conditioning, though most have heating.

The team focused on varieties of cardiovascular disease among 188,000 deaths during this time. It then overlaid hourly temperature, weather and air quality data to figure out what variables were linked.

The Heart paper showed that when temperatures rose from 20 degrees Celsius to 25 C, deaths from cardiovascular disease rose by 9.5 percent. Surging heat created a residual impact that lasted a day or two.

However, when temperatures fell from minus 1 to minus 8 C, heart-related fatalities rose by 7.9 percent. These effects lingered up to two weeks after a cold snap.

“We were a bit surprised at how big the effects had been for heart failure,” Schneider said.

The study on pollution showed that ozone, which tends to form on hotter days, changes the risk profile of heat stress. However, particulate matter didn’t seem to have any impacts on the links between temperature and deaths.

Reasons, though, remain unclear
The mechanisms linking temperature, pollution and death remain murky. “There are several hypotheses, and nothing is really 100 percent clear,” Schneider said.

One idea is that warmer weather may increase the risk of blood clots, an important factor in many heart problems. The fact that temperature surges over one or two days have such a strong effect indicates that variability, not just extremes, can drive up risk.

The elderly and people with existing heart conditions are especially vulnerable.

But warmer winters under climate change may not offer any refuge, according to Philip Staddon, a research fellow at the University of Exeter Medical School who co-authored a study on this topic earlier this year (ClimateWire, Feb. 24).

“This looks like a nice paper,” he said of Schneider’s findings. “And I’m pleased that their result confirms our hypothesis about short-term changes in temperature.”

Health effects from low temperatures tend to increase more slowly and linger for weeks rather than days, Staddon observed. This makes it more difficult to figure out what is harming people at a physiological level.

With these findings, researchers expect to tailor warnings to specific vulnerable populations. Schneider suggested issuing combined air quality and temperature alerts for regions at risk for surges in heart attacks and heart failures.

The next step for her team is to start looking at individuals instead of just populations, identifying blood markers and other physiological signals that illustrate how a person is responding to his or her environment, even before needing to go to the hospital.

“We are trying to look at subclinical markers that change with temperature,” Schneider said. “That is actually our goal: to find the real mechanism behind these effects.”

via http://www.scientificamerican.com/

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Air Quality Health Advisory Issued For New York State

Posted on September 3, 2014 by Respro® UK Ltd

New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner Joe Martens and State Department of Health (DOH) Acting Commissioner Howard Zucker, M.D., J.D., issued an Air Quality Health Advisory for the New York City Metro and Long Island regions of New York State for Tuesday, September 2, 2014.

The pollutant of concern is: Ozone

The advisory will be in effect: 2 p.m. through 10 p.m.

DEC and DOH issue Air Quality Health Advisories when DEC meteorologists predict levels of pollution, either ozone or fine particulate matter, are expected to exceed an Air Quality Index (AQI) value of 100. The AQI was created as an easy way to correlate levels of different pollutants to one scale, with a higher AQI value leading to a greater health concern.

OZONE
Summer heat can lead to the formation of ground level ozone a major component of smog. Automobile exhaust and out-of-state emission sources are the primary causes of ground level ozone and are the most serious air pollution problems in the northeast. This surface pollutant should not be confused with the protective layer of ozone in the upper atmosphere.

People, especially young children, those who exercise outdoors, those involved in vigorous outdoor work and those who have respiratory disease (such as asthma) should consider limiting strenuous outdoor physical activity when ozone levels are the highest (generally afternoon to early evening). When outdoor levels of ozone are elevated, going indoors will usually reduce your exposure. Individuals experiencing symptoms such as shortness of breath, chest pain or coughing should consider consulting their doctor.

Ozone levels generally decrease at night and can be minimized during daylight hours by
curtailment of automobile travel and the use of public transportation where available.

New Yorkers also are urged to take the following energy saving and pollution-reducing steps:
use mass transit or carpool instead of driving, as automobile emissions account for about 60 percent of pollution in our cities;
conserve fuel and reduce exhaust emissions by combining necessary motor vehicle trips;
turn off all lights and electrical appliances in unoccupied areas;
use fans to circulate air. If air conditioning is necessary, set thermostats at 78 degrees;
close the blinds and shades to limit heat build-up and to preserve cooled air;
use of household appliances. If necessary, run the appliances at off-peak (after 7 p.m.) hours. These would include dishwashers, dryers, pool pumps and water heaters;
set refrigerators and freezers at more efficient temperatures;
purchase and install energy efficient lighting and appliances with the Energy Star label; and
reduce or eliminate outdoor burning and attempt to minimize indoor sources of PM 2.5 such as smoking.
A toll free Air Quality Hotline (1-800-535-1345) has been established by DEC to keep New Yorkers informed of the latest Air Quality situation. Further information on ozone and PM 2.5 is available on DEC’s website and on the DOH website.

Air Quality Health Advisory regions consists of the following:
1. Region 1 Long Island includes: Suffolk and Nassau counties.
2. Region 2 New York City Metro includes: New York City, Westchester and Rockland counties.

via Air Quality Health Advisory Issued For New York State | LongIsland.com.

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China Issues Tax Breaks for Green Cars to Tackle Air Pollution

Posted on September 2, 2014 by Respro® UK Ltd

China has introduced tax breaks on sales of electric cars, in an attempt to reduce pollution in the world’s most populous country.

The measure is targeted at sales of energy efficient cars made by Chinese manufacturers.

The country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reported that 17 vehicles from 11 manufacturers would be affected by the changes.

China is seeking to boost sales of electric vehicles, as well as hybrid vehicles that run on a combination of electricity and another source of power, such as petrol or diesel.

Electric vehicles sales are already subsidised by Beijing, amid concern over air pollution levels in the country.

In February Chinese scientists warned that toxic smog was so bad it resembled a nuclear winter and threatened the country’s food supply.

In its ‘new energy’ programme for electric powered vehicles, China pays a subsidy of 60,000 yuan ($9,767, £5,876, €7,434) towards purchases of battery cars, while offering 35,000 yuan for hybrid cars.

Government officials were ordered to increase their usage of electric and hybrid cars in July, while China’s president Xi Jinping has urged state agencies to increase purchases of domestic brands.

Meanwhile, the government is considering a new tax on gasoline in a bid to fund its green energy push.

Wang Chuanfu, chairman of the electric car maker BYD, said in August that a small tax hike of 0.2 yuan on a litre of gasoline, which could raise billions of yuan in revenues, was under consideration.

In 2012, the government set a target to have 500,000 ‘new energy’ vehicles on China’s roads by 2015, increasing to five million by 2020.

In the first six month of 2014, 16,483 ‘new energy’ vehicles were sold in China, more than double the amount in the same period in 2013, according to Automotive Foresight, an industry research firm.

via China Issues Tax Breaks for Green Cars to Tackle Air Pollution.

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