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.
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. -------
