Introduction
Air pollution is one of the biggest environmental problems that the world is facing. With the carbon and greenhouse gas emissions in both developed and developing countries showing no signs of slowing down, one can only assume that the levels of air pollution would only get worse as time passes. What makes this environmental issue so important is the fact that humans breathe air, particularly oxygen, in order to survive. Without clean and safely breathable air, people become at risk of developing serious medical conditions, especially ones that damage and deteriorate the respiratory system.
Air can be contaminated in various ways. For one, it can be contaminated by natural and man-made means. Molds can develop when the air becomes too moist; molds that get inhaled can be toxic and harmful to some people, especially to those who suffer from a certain form of allergic reaction after inhalation. On the man-made side of things, air pollutants or solutes released into the atmosphere by factories and industrial plants can contaminate the air that people living in nearby communities breathe.
This is so far the classic and most commonly known case and cause of air pollution. It only makes sense for it to be so. After all, industrial plants such as factories and power production facilities are among the biggest contributors to air pollution. Another interesting source of air pollution to look at would be the public and private transportation sector.
Cars that are used privately and publicly, at least majority of the ones released and being used today, rely on the conversion of energy stored in fossil fuels (e.g. oil and petrol) into heat and then mechanical energy—which is what enables the engine of a typical four wheel car generate torque and horsepower. Regardless of the cause and source, however, the most important question to ask would be whether the effects of air pollution are positive or negative. To which, the answer is pretty much obvious. The effects of air pollution on a person’s health and wellness are totally negative. In the case of this paper, however, the author aims to identify how negative and what exactly those negative effects are, while focusing on the health component.
The Respiratory System – A Brief Background
In order to accomplish this paper’s goals and objectives, it would be important to present a brief background of the respiratory system first. The body is made up of various organ systems. Each organ system, in turn, is made up of different organs. Suffice to say, each organ system present in the body performs a major function and is therefore equally important. One of those organ systems is the respiratory system.
The respiratory system is mainly responsible for respiration or the body’s internal mechanism of exchanging gases—mostly oxygen and carbon dioxide. The body’s respiration mechanism works by flushing air containing carbon dioxide molecules out of the body and taking air containing oxygen in. In order to understand why, the body’s organs and cells expel carbon dioxide as a byproduct of certain metabolic activities.
Too much carbon dioxide in the blood leads to abnormal levels of acidity and toxicity, hence the need to take them out via the respiratory system. Oxygen, on the other hand, is needed by all cells and therefore all tissues and organs in the body for survival. The brain, for example, would only be able to survive for a couple of minutes in an oxygen-deprived environment. The respiratory system is the organ system that is also responsible for taking in air that contains oxygen. Therefore, the respiratory system has to be able to simultaneously take in oxygen and take out carbon dioxide from the body. This information is all meant to highlight the importance of the respiratory system in maintaining a person’s health equilibrium and overall wellness.
Air Pollution – How it Works
According to the World Health Organization, air pollution is a process wherein the air that people breathe gets contaminated with non-naturally occurring solutes such as solid and or liquid particles that can cause harm to plants, animals, and humans and may even lead to their deaths .
What most people do not know is that there are, in general, two types of air pollution: natural and man-made . Natural air pollution is caused by natural activities such as forest fires, gaseous release from radioactive decay of rocks and other substances found inside the earth, and the air pollution caused by volcanic eruptions. Natural causes of air pollution can, in fact, be as damaging as the man-made ones, although they occur less frequently.
Forest fires, for example, can produce swathes of smoke that can travel for many miles from the actual site or location; the same is true for volcanic eruptions . The other type of air pollution is the artificial or man-made. This second type of air pollution is caused by anything that people do that involves combustion.
A classic and long ridiculed example is the burning of fossil fuels such as natural gas, oil, and most especially coal in order to generate energy. Coal, so far, is the most heavily used fossil fuel in the power generation industry because it is not only cheap but also abundant. The downside to its tested economic and cost-efficiency-related benefits, however, is its negative environmental effects; it is so far the most polluting and hazardous (from a health perspective) among other types of fossil fuels that are being burned for energy .
The man-made causes of air pollution include traffic, power plants, and industrial plants and factories . Traffic-related air pollution is caused by gasoline and diesel-powered car engines. According to a report published by Green Car Reports (2014), there are now over 1.2 billion vehicles in the world’s roads and that this number is set to hit the 2 billion mark in 2035. These billions of cars significantly contribute to air pollution and also to the reinforcement of the conditions that lead to its negative health effects .
Industrialization has long been associated with economic development and prosperity. That is, a country that is highly industrialized is often a country that is successfully economically. While this may be true, it is also true that these countries are among the biggest air polluters.
How Air Pollution affects the Respiratory System
The main organ of the respiratory system is the lungs. It is where the actual exchange of gases occurs; a person exposed in dangerously high levels of air pollution would also tend to have the highest level of dysfunction in this organ. There are numerous medication conditions and diseases that may arise as a result of exposure (either acute or chronic) to air pollution.
Asthma is so far the most common respiratory system and air pollution-related health threat. According to a long term prospective cohort study with individual exposure measurement about the relationship between air pollution and asthma onset in children, traffic-related air pollution is one of the risk factors associated with the development of asthma and other respiratory system-related diseases; this just confirms that the presence of air pollution itself contributes to the rise in cases of respiratory diseases .
The results of their study confirmed the presence of a direct correlation between new onset of asthma among a population of children and air pollution, particularly the type that is generated by traffic (e.g. cars powered by internal combustion engines). For a brief background on the disease, asthma is a respiratory disease that is hallmarked by the presence of inflammation, narrowing, and tightness of the chest airways. The main culprit in an asthmatic attack is the inflammation. It is the airways that get inflamed in a person with asthma. Respiratory airways are like tubes. They have a fixed diameter and so any alteration caused by say, inflammation, can directly contribute to the flow of air in those pathways.
When the airways get inflamed, their air transport ability gets impeded. This is what creates the clinical signs and symptoms of patients with asthma such as (but may not be limited to) shortness of breath, wheezing, coughing, and chest tightness. What makes asthma a serious health pollution-related problem is the fact that it is triggered by the pollutants in the air; exposure to a highly polluted air can therefore trigger an acute asthma attack which can be life threatening especially if left unaddressed.
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a more serious but less common medical disorder that comes as a result of exposure to overly polluted air. COPD affects an individual’s respiratory system differently compared to asthma. COPD is progressive; which means that as the presence of the irritant or the root cause is there, the patient’s condition and signs and symptoms may get worse.
COPD is also a little bit more complicated because it affects the internal parts of the lungs. The lungs are divided into bronchi, bronchiole, and alveoli. The bronchi and bronchioles are air pathways within the lungs; the alveoli, on the other hand, are air sacs where the air gests stored. These airways and air sacs have an elastic quality.
The purpose of which is to enable them to expand whenever the person inhales the air and to recoil back to its original position after inspiration. One of the major triggers of COPD is the disappearance or the lessening of the effectiveness of the person’s airways and air sacs’ elastic quality .
This means that they would not be able to expand and contract as needed. This translates to a decrease in the overall function of the lungs. When the lungs’ capacity is decreased to a low enough point, clinical signs and symptoms such as shortness of breath and coughing—both of which are common among COPD patients, may start to appear. Another cause of COPD is the clogging of the air sacs and ways. This is where air pollution comes into the picture.
When a person is exposed to a highly polluted environment, the solutes (i.e. pollutants) present in the air would eventually make their way to the innermost parts of the lungs and get clogged there. And when they do, that would be marked as the start of the early development of COPD. And as mentioned earlier, COPD is a progressive respiratory disease.
This means that as more air pollutants get clogged inside the person’s lungs, the worse his breathing condition becomes. COPD is also a life-threatening disease. It slowly develops until it already becomes impossible for the patient to breathe normally.
These are just some of the common medical conditions that primarily affect the respiratory system that can be attributed to the excessively high levels of air pollution in some of the world’s busiest cities. An interesting place to look at would be China.
According to an academic journal published in Atmospheric Environment, the total health damages due to the total anthropogenic emissions since the year 2000 from Zaozhuang alone (using a metric that measured the subjects’ willingness to pay) was equivalent to 10% of the entire city’s gross domestic product, which is a lot . The same study also confirmed the hypothesis that suggests that infrastructures that are related to power generation and industry are among the highest contributors to the air pollution.
According to a report published in Business Insider in 2015, the level of air pollution in China, a developing country and one of the world’s most heavily industrialized and proportionally economically wealthy countries, is 22 times higher than what is considered healthy or normal base on international standards .
This present situation on China and other western countries that are also highly industrialized basically confirm that paradigm. The worst thing about the presence of factories and industrial plants is that their effects are cumulative; that is, they accumulate. Therefore, although their one-time contribution to air pollution may not be that high, if one is going to do some computation, their total contribution would come as a big surprise.
According to another report focusing on the United States (a developed country) published in the New England Journal of Medicine, air pollution levels in the United States have risen steadily since the 1980s as a result of further industrialization . This is important because studies have identified particulate levels in the air to be a variable that is associated with life expectancy (i.e. inversely related). So far, it is the same for both these two countries when it comes to air pollution level trends (upward).
Possible Solutions
There are many proposed solutions to air pollution. One of which is the use of technology to promote environmental sustainability. The idea that is being raised whenever environmental sustainability is being raised as a solution is the use of renewable energy and the shifting away from the use of fossil fuels to power the world economy. The use of secondary strategies (strategies that are meant to address the damages already made by humans as far as air pollution is concerned) has also been raised. Examples would be the use of carbon and air pollutant capture systems meant to reduce air pollution levels in already polluted areas.
The use of nuclear power stations, solar energy and wind energy production facilities have also been raised (among other clean and renewable energy alternatives). With the use of the latest technologies and renewable energy production methodologies, pollution can, at least based on theory, be considerably minimized, if not completely be removed. As a result, the health and economic effects (both direct and indirect) of air pollution can be addressed.
Conclusions
There are many proposed solutions to the current dilemma on the effects of air pollution on health, particularly the respiratory system. So far, these are based on theoretical models. They are yet to be proven because no meaningful steps have been made involving the proposed solutions’ actual use. Some of the proposed solutions include the use of new technologies to produce and consume energy. Energy production facilities are a great contributor to the total air pollution generated in this planet. The same is true for the cars and other conventional fossil fuel-based energy consumers (e.g. factories and industrial plants). Therefore, if the root energy production and consumption means can be converted from one that uses non-renewable and fossil-fuel sources to one that is totally clean and renewable, then the entire problem on air pollution, including the health-related ones, can be addressed, for good that is.
References
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