[HN Gopher] America's Coming Smoke Epidemic
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America's Coming Smoke Epidemic
Author : JumpCrisscross
Score : 65 points
Date : 2025-06-29 17:18 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| dayofthedaleks wrote:
| [0] -
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250629175151/https://www.theat...
| vanc_cefepime wrote:
| 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
| davidw wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| If this paper is true there's an extra disease wrinkle -
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438942...
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| tea-lover wrote:
| 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 ug/m3 of PM2.5 is a
| pretty average winter day, and in evenings it goes up to 1000
| ug/m3, and sometimes even higher.
|
| (The yearly average WHO recommendation for PM2.5 is no more
| than 5 ug/m3; in my neighbourhood the yearly average is around
| 150 ug/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 ug/m3 of NO2 and 200-800 ug/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.
| bozhark wrote:
| Perhaps the saturation level of your area's pollution in
| lungs and other body parts inhibits the ability for COVIDs
| effects to materialize
| photon_garden wrote:
| 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.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| 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.
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