Tag Archives: pollution

Gun range air quality problems ?

That old adage: “guns don’t kill people, people kill people?” Turns out it was wrong. Guns do kill people, albeit slowly and from an unlikely source.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently conducted a study of air quality in gun ranges, taking blood samples from people who frequently attend the firing ranges, like law enforcement personnel. Then, the CDC compared the blood samples to people who don’t go gunning.

The Results

The finding: people who frequent ranges have elevated levels of lead in their blood. The lead is the result of inhaling lead dust, lead vapor and associated fumes, the byproduct of a gun’s discharge. Lead poisoning and long-term exposure to lead dust can result in severe abdominal pain, vomiting, seizures and even organ failure. The gun range air quality can kill you?

Clearly, gun ranges should consider indoor air quality and focus on improvements—like perhaps installing AeraMax® Professional commercial-grade air purifiers in common areas. These air purifiers remove up to 99.97 percent of airborne contaminants from enclosed spaces and employ hospital-type filtration with True HEPA filters.

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It’s become a common sight—small helicopter-like devices buzzing in the air above parks and open spaces, with operators controlling them from afar. Indeed, drones are even taking over commercial applications, with Amazon testing the delivery of packages via drone copters, and military operations, with drones used for airstrikes.
Now, governments are taking the technology into new vistas. The Polish city of Krakow recently outfitted aerial drones with pollution monitors in an effort to understand where air pollution is being emitted.

According to drone maker Pawel Kalisz, his creations include a 34x optical zoom, pollution sensors and thermal imaging technology, so operators can see via tablet-based controls where illegal burning of toxic material is being done. The city has had a problem of residents disposing of all sorts of rubbish in their fireplaces and stoves, causing spikes in pollution levels. So, the drones would be used to determine where scofflaws are burning toxic materials and would aid in inspections and fines to reduce violations.
The drones operate in the morning hours and at night, when most violations occur. Data readings will be analyzed and correlated to imagery taken during flights, to pinpoint where scofflaws are burning refuse.

This type of technology would be a boon in developing countries, where infrastructures aren’t well established to warrant developing permanent air sensor towers in towns and villages. Additionally, factories spring up in rural areas, and often flaunt pollution restrictions and regulations, so the use of portable and mobile drones would help governments regulate unchecked growth and stave off violations without significant capital outlays.

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In recent years, foggy Londontown has been more like smoggy Londontown—that’s because diesel vehicle emissions have gone unchecked, spewing toxic nitrogen dioxide chemicals into an air that was more souplike than fresh.

Now, however, the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, plans to do something about it.

He’s proposed a doubling in funds to combat air pollution, and aims to improve overall air quality via new measures. The biggest move: he plans to improve the more than 9,000 buses in the city’s public bus fleet, retrofitting them to operate on clean diesel fuel or replace buses outright. He also will be creating a compensation fund to prompt taxi drivers to replace older taxis with electric or hydrogen-fueled cars with zero emissions.

In addition, he’s developed a “low emissions zone” in the city, where older diesel vehicles that produce more nitrogen dioxide pay more to enter. That hopefully will encourage owners of these vehicles to replace them in the long run.

“With nearly 10,000 Londoners dying early every year due to air pollution, tackling poor air quality is a public health emergency that requires bold action,” Khan said. “I want London to be a world leader in how we respond to the challenge of cleaning up our air.”

Still, there’s a long way to go. To wit: a plan proposed by the mayor to ban older cars altogether was voted down by the local government.

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We’ve reported numerous times about the respiratory health effects of pollution, but a pair of new studies are highlighting additional dangers of smog and particulate matter in the air we breathe.

The first study, conducted by Ryu Matsuo, M.D., a professor at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, drew correlations between airborne pollution and the chances of suffering a stroke during days with high levels of pollution in the air. By comparing data on 6885 cases of stroke and mapping where and when they occurred with an overlay of pollution readings, Matsuo found that increased levels of particulate matter in the air within one day of a stroke event coincided. 

The conclusion: higher levels of PM2.5 concentrations in the air create higher chances that a person can suffer a stroke within a day of the elevated levels; PM2.5 refers to air pollutants with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less, which are small enough to invade airways.

The second study, conducted by King’s College London in the UK, found there was an increased risk of death after someone suffered a stroke if that person was exposed to high levels of air pollution before their stroke. Again, researchers compared stroke data with the levels of PM2.5 pollution in areas where the stroke victims resided—the higher the concentrations of pollution, the higher the risk of death after a stroke.

The studies underscore the importance of clean air for all—PM2.5 contaminants are present in indoor air was well as the outdoors. So, air purification, like that offered by the line of commercial-grade AeraMax® Professional line of air purifiers, is vital for health.

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