Diesel fumes kill

            The most strongly carcinogenic compound ever analysed (3-Nitrobenzanthrone) is found on the surface of particulates, soot, in the exhausts of diesel engines. Diesel engines make you sick, yet these vehicles do not have catalytic converters or any equivalent exhaust cleaning system. 

Either vehicles with diesel engines must be fitted with devices in the tailpipes to capture the particulates or diesel engines must be made to burn them all up, reprocess and neutralise the 3-Nitrobenzanthrone within the power generating process. Banning diesel engines from built up areas with shops that need supplying cannot be done. But they have got to stop killing people.   

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/05/18/wfumes18.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/05/18/ixworld.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=67196

Car fumes 'may cause one in six cot deaths'

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor

Exhaust fumes from vehicles may be to blame for up to a sixth of cot deaths, says an international study.

Soot from combustion is already linked with lung disease, asthma and a rise in deaths from cardiovascular disease.

Now scientists have linked the tiny pollutant particles with 16 per cent of unexplained deaths among babies of normal birth weight.

The particles, called PM10s because they are less than 10 micrometers in diameter, may also be responsible for 24 per cent of all respiratory disease deaths of normal birth weight infants under the age of one.

The international team looked at death rates among 700,000 infants in the United States between 1995 and 1997 and compared them with air pollution levels.

The average all-cause mortality rate was 236.8 deaths per 100,000 infants, with 14.7 per 100,000 attributed to PM10 pollution. In the case of unexplained infant deaths, the figure was 11.7 per 100,000 - 16 per cent of the total.

The research, led by Dr Reinhard Kaiser, previously at the University of Basel in Switzerland, was published in the online journal Environmental Health: A Global Access Science Source.

The scientists wrote: "Evidence is building that air pollution has an effect on infants and young children and a potential impact during the foetal period…We conclude that air pollution-related infant mortality is a major public health problem."

Cot death, or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (Sids), affects about 300 babies a year in Britain. The Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths said it was likely that the link between air pollution and cot death was real, and not the result of confounding factors.

In the current issue of the journal Science, a team led by Prof James Quinn of McMaster University, Ontario, reports evidence that particulate air pollution can produce a genetic timebomb, after discovering that mutations caused by the pollution in male mice can be passed to future generations.

In the journal, Prof Quinn, Dr Christopher Somers and colleagues describe how they exposed two groups of laboratory mice to air at an industrial site near a major motorway but passed the air for one group through a filter designed to remove particulates. The researchers also repeated the experiment with two groups in a rural area.

After 10 weeks of exposure, the mice were bred and the researchers looked for mutations in marker genetic sequences.

The team found that offspring of the mice that had breathed the polluted, unfiltered air inherited mutations from their fathers twice as frequently as the offspring from the other three groups.

This result suggests that the culprit is airborne particulate matter: microscopic, breathable particles of soot and dust that are often attached to toxic chemicals, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which can cause DNA mutations. These particles can penetrate deep into the body.

Research by Prof Günter Oberdörster at the University of Rochester in New York has shown that the very smallest particles, called nanoparticles, can become dispersed widely in the body after being inhaled. They accumulate not only in the lungs but find their way to parts of the brain.

 I seem to have been banging on about this since 1996!
 

            Air pollution has gone up again in spite of all the pressure to stop people using cars, and the government is making a huge song and dance of pressing for research to be started. Work already done by Hitomi Suzuki at Kyoto University clearly shows that the most strongly carcinogenic compound ever analysed (3-Nitrobenzanthrone) is found on the surface of particulates in the exhausts of diesel engines. Diesel engines make you sick, yet these vehicles do not have catalytic converters or any equivalent exhaust cleaning system. 

            A modern car emits exhaust that is cleaner than the air taken in, and according to research already done by the National Environment Technology Centre it takes 128 cars to produce as much pollution as one bus. If all buses always carried in excess of 128 passengers who would otherwise go by car they could be said to be helping the environment, but they do not.

            If this government is really serious about cutting air pollution in our cities they must ban the buses and bring in more cars. Not enough parking spaces. The only sensible solution is to force public transport operators to use petrol instead of diesel and to make them use properly maintained catalytic converters.

            Try it for a week, ban the buses and bring in more cars and see what the figures say. The scientific research has been done already. All it takes is the political will to use it.
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