Even if the air pollution is low… A pack of cigarettes per day?

Inhaling contaminated air can lead to health damage, such as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

This is the first study to review the long-term role of various air pollutants in the development of emphysema. As a result, air pollution can seriously damage the lungs.

This study investigates multiethnic atherosclerosis and is based on data from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA). It also includes more than 15,000 heart and lung CT scans and lung function tests conducted on 7,071 adults aged 45 to 84 in six locations across the U.S. between 2000 and 2018.

These data are not only large in sample size, but are also helpful because they are targeted at different ethnicities in LA, Chicago and New York. In most cities, air pollution levels such as particulate matter, nitrogen oxides and carbon black are lowered. However, ozone is the only exceptionally increasing increase. In the surveyed cities, the average annual ozone concentration was 10 to 25 ppb.

The US Environmental Protection Agency’s EPA standard is not considered to be a health hazard at concentrations below 100 ppb. However, the survey shows that even at low concentrations, long-term exposure may be dangerous to public health. People who have been exposed to ozone for more than 10 years, even at 3 ppb, face the same risk of emphysema as those who smoked daily for 29 years. Extreme heat exacerbates surface level ozone pollution. The research team is pointing out the possibility that the pollutants will spread further under the weather crisis. Experts say the findings show that there are no safe levels of air pollution. Related information can be found here .