A toxin, as the redoubtable reader undoubtedly knows, is a poison. And a poison, says Mr Webster, is that which causes “morbid, noxious, or deadly effects”.
People who ingest or breath toxic, which is to say poisonous, substances, especially if they do so on a continuous basis over a long period of time, do not live as long or as well as those who do not, on average.
Well, so much used to be routine medical knowledge. But since the idiot panic of 2020, and of the great wokening of all things, medical “knowledge” is now what you can get away with saying. Like “some women have penises” or “if you are vaccinated you cannot catch covid.”
And “almost everyone in Europe is breathing toxic air”.
So says the propagandists at The Guardian.. They also say “98% of Europeans breathing highly damaging polluted air linked to 400,000 deaths a year.”
Now we’ve discussed this many times, but “linked to” is one of the most marvelous creations of modern The Science. It arises from the faulty idea of “null hypothesis significance testing.” “Significance” itself means having a wee P-value. And wee p-values mean your hypothesis is “linked to” some causal proposition, like toxic air is killing people.
Since it is logically impossible—not just unlikely: impossible—for a wee P to prove cause, yet those who flash their wee Ps around earnestly desire to claim cause, but know they cannot, they lash out with phrases like “linked to” or “associated with”, which are utterly empty of any causal language. They mean only wee P. And wee P says nothing about cause.
In other words, every time you see “linked to” or “associated with” or the like, guard your wallet.
Europe is facing a “severe public health crisis”, with almost everyone across the continent living in areas with dangerous levels of air pollution, an investigation by the Guardian has found.
Analysis of data gathered using cutting-edge methodology – including detailed satellite images and measurements from more than 1,400 ground monitoring stations – reveals a dire picture of dirty air, with 98% of people living in areas with highly damaging fine particulate pollution that exceed World Health Organization guidelines. Almost two-thirds live in areas where air quality is more than double the WHO’s guidelines.
Here is their Map Of Deadliness:
The WHO, that earnest agency that led the covid panic, puts the “safe” level of PM2.5 at 5 micro grams per cubic meter of air.
PM2.5? It is dust which contains particles the size of 2.5 microns or smaller. For fun, I typed into the woke search engine “Can masks block PM 2.5” and it returned in bold these words: “Should you wear a surgical mask? Even though a surgical mask cannot filter out the small particles in the air…”
Amusing, is it not? Not to say hilarious. For, you see, the coronadoom virus suspended in particles (like moisture from your breath) averages around 0.125 microns (the viron itself is much smaller still). Which is twenty times smaller than PM2.5, which is supposed to be deadly, but which masks can’t block.
Masks are one huge scientific joke. So feel free to laugh.
Anyway, back to PM2.5. What do Experts say it does? With my emphasis, PM2.5 is “tiny airborne particles mostly produced from the burning of fossil fuels, some of which can pass through the lungs and into the blood stream, affecting almost every organ in the body.”
Isn’t that something. Every organ of the body. Amazing. Almost a miracle disease.
Here’s a quote from an Expert: “‘This is a severe public health crisis,’ said Roel Vermeulen, a professor of environmental epidemiology at Utrecht University who led the team of researchers across the continent that compiled the data. ‘What we see quite clearly is that nearly everyone in Europe is breathing unhealthy air.'”
All right, since PM2.5 affects almost every organ in the body, people sucking it in must be dying earlier, especially as it’s claimed PM2.5 only increases. Let’s see. Poland is pretty purple on the map. Let’s ask the woke search engine for Poland’s life expectancy, which surely must be decreasing if PM2.5 affects almost every organ in the body. And let’s compare Poland to, say, Portugal. Starts with ‘P’, too, you see, and is a nice light color on the map. We’ll toss in a few more, too, like North Macedonia, which Experts say has the worst PM2.5.
The numbers only go up to 2020, at which time there is a dip everywhere, because of the covid panic. So ignore that.
Except for Russia and Ukraine, for reasons you can best ask Victoria Nuland about, the progress is only up, Up, UP. But this was all before the woke really stuck, and before the panic, so perhaps these trends reached their max in 2019.
In any case, there is no evidence here that PM2.5, which affects almost every organ in the body, is taking a great toll in lives.
How about, say, asthma? That surely is exacerbated by dust. According to one paper “In the Portuguese population, the prevalence of ‘Current asthma’ was 6.8%…and of ‘Lifetime asthma’ was 10.5%.” Another says, In Poland “The overall prevalence of asthma was 8.6%…among children and 5.4%…among adults.”
There are other papers with differing numbers, but they all bounce around these figures, more or less. There is no way to tell Portugal and Poland apart from them, even though, according to The Guardian Portugal’s air is crystal clear compared to Poland’s.
Of course, there is little profit in these gross comparisons, for the simple reason that the Portuguese are not the Polish. Their habits differ, their industries differ, their climates differ, their demographics differ, even as their PM2.5 differs. We’d have to put in herculean efforts to do comparisons worth doing.
Which nobody does. They make “linked to” statements instead, hoping you’ll fall for it.
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Health experts better talk to talk to climate experts before advising decisive political action. Otherwise we might burn in hell after clouds gone missing…
If we roll out sleeves up & make an effort & get rid of all the evil micro / nano particles completely forever we’ll all live twice as long or more or maybe forever, after all, one death is always one death too many.
I haven’t been near London for at least 20 years, it’s too near to Milton Keynes, so there might be no Londoners left by now.
This PM2.5 trial ballon is a dud. No one is going to panic about dust, their houses are full of the stuff, and ‘two-point-five’ is a nerd word. No sir, no terror, not sexy, nobody cares. Not like covid, the new benchmark for terror hoaxing, which put people in pure, pustulating, pestiferous panic. Everybody loved covid, being drenched in fear, screaming, shouting, raging at perfect strangers. Good times. The Ministry of Fear needs to up its game.
All Hail! Sadiq Khan the almighty mayor and saviour of London who has recently extended the Ultra Low Emissions Zone around the capital and has at the stroke of a pen reduced the famous smog to a healthy PM 2.5 level of 2.3 micrograms/cubic metre as measured by me just now outside my flat window. The air is officially clean and beautiful! Having done that could he please just stop charging me £12.50 per day to use my car which the last time it was measured for its annual MOT test produced an exhaust particulate level of 0.0 I look forward to eternal life so I suppose £12.50 per day is cheap.
That is an oversimplified definition. Dose and route of administration make the medicine or the poison. Toxicity is conditional. Puts on my chemists’s hat: A poison is a substance that interferes with a desired chemical reaction or interaction. It may be reversible competition or irreversible chemical alteration of substances involved in the desired reaction or interaction, or both. Linear no threshold thinking about toxins is just as wrong as linear no threshold thinking about ionizing radiation (and maybe radiation of any kind).
As far as dust goes, there is a reason why we have mucous membranes. Sure, they can be overwhelmed; but that gets us back to dosage.
Ten tons of meteoric dust above 30 microns fall to earth each day. The majority of the mass of micrometeorites, however, ablates off in the upper atmosphere, and is not accounted for in studies. Inevitably, tons of meteoric dust in the <2.5 micron size fall to earth each day. You have breathed it in all your life, as has every other air breathing creature that has ever lived.
How was the PM 2.5 threshold arrived at? I’m going to assume it was settled on by convenience, without any empirical study–but what’s the evidence of usefulness?
Notice that the Canadian parliament is getting scolded by the press for THE MISTAKE of honoring a nazi
The press does not scold them for BEING IGNORANT KNOW-NOTHING MORONS.
You wonder why.
“…Europeans breathing highly damaging polluted air linked to 400,000 deaths a year.”
I burst into laughter when I read that statement. I’ve got to an age where I’ve heard every kind of bullshit they can spew from their firehose, and I can’t take any of it seriously.
Every year, for the past two decades, I’ve watched the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France, the Vuelta a Espana, and several other bicycle races on television. That’s three to five hours per racing day, following the riders all over Italy, France, Spain, and other European countries, including the most populated, urbanized, industrialized areas. In spite of the fact that these races take place in late spring and throughout summer, I have never seen a hint, in the beautiful high-definition images, of air pollution–what we here in the lost state of California used to call “smog”. Air quality throughout Europe is among the highest in the industrialized world.
Every field of endeavor needs a sanity check to protect itself from the “fast-talkers”. In the STEM fields, that sanity check is often the conservation of energy, or more generally, the “no free lunch” concept. In the field of societal human health research, a good sanity check is the mortality numbers. The Covid panic (largely through our host) enlightened me on this topic in two ways – first, how well the mortality numbers are tracked in most countries, and second, how useless most “cause of death” attributions are. Sanity check: if you add up all the claims of how many people died of X for all claimed X’s, you invariably get a total that greatly exceeds excess mortality. In other words, in order to fluff up the importance of their work, every researcher claims an exaggerated piece of the excess mortality pie.
I once worked for a company that suffered huge losses during one of the technology boom-bust cycles. The losses were much higher than one would expect from the market decline. The company consisted of a number of semi-autonomous divisions; corporate was worried that there might be some fraud hidden in the losses, so they brought in a team of forensic accountants. The accountants discovered that all the divisions were forecasting that they would capture a sizable percentage of a high-growth emerging market that, although described in different terms, turned out to be essentially all the same market. Big picture, only seen in hindsight, the company was forecasting capturing something like 400% of the market (and spending commensurate with that forecast). Swept under the rug was the root cause, which was that corporate had set minimum forecast numbers so high that all the divisions had to abandon evolutionary growth their traditional markets and chase the high-growth emerging markets.
If you are a societal human health researcher in today’s publish-or-perish environment, the problem is that people are selfishly refusing to die in the required numbers.
Oh noes, we’ll all have to migrate to Africa. We can wave to the Africans going the other way to get into Europe.
bloody hell….twenty times smaller?
It may not be lethal, but it still sucks to live downwind from California wild (woke) fires.