8 ms·

Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution

196 points by hammock 4y ago

hammock 4y ago
I wanted to find an account of what the biggest sources of PM2.5 are in the US. This article discusses traffic fumes (24% of PM2.5), but I was surprised to learn that by far, the largest source of PM2.5 - 45% - is “unspecified sources of human origin.” Where does that stuff come from? Well, it’s created in the atmosphere via secondary reactions between agricultural NH3 emissions, SO2 and NOx emissions from shipping and industrial activities and power generation, and NMVOCs from industrial processes and consumption of solvents.[1] Those reactions seem like an interesting area of study and those chemicals involved are far less-often discussed as sources of air pollution even though they seem to combine to form the biggest source [1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1352231015303320 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223101...
- zibby8 4y ago
  I wonder how important the raw amount of emissions is. Density should decrease at a cubic rate of distance, so being close to a small source of emissions might be worse than being somewhat far from a heavier source.
  - projectramo 4y ago
    See for yourself. Propublica plotted a "cancer map" of elevated cancer risks, and you can see how it drops off as you go away from certain points. https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/ https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/
    - dylan604 4y ago
      Interesting. One question totally non-sequiter to the toxicity conversation, but why do people that use maps orient the image in a direction other than North being up so that they have to add a label to the image indicating the direction of North?
      - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
        For local navigation (e.g. your phone screen, laying a map on a table, etc) it's generally considered best practice to orient the map so that North is North. For abstract purposes North is up is the standard. I can't think of a good reason to do otherwise unless you're trying to illustrate a point specifically about local navigation (e.g. orienting a map so that the headwaters of a navigable river are at the top).
    - mrtweetyhack 4y ago
  - treis 4y ago
    It's pretty hard to separate correlation from causation. There's way more sources of carcinogens than just car generated pollution. And lots of them will tend to correlate with poverty/working class which will tend to correlate with living next to highways.
- rufius 4y ago
  The other thing people don’t often talk of is PM2.5 inside their home while cooking. Lot of people have poor ventilation or insufficient air movement capacity in their kitchens.
  - mavhc 4y ago
    From the food, or the fuel?
    - epistasis 4y ago
      A lot of it is from the natural gas combustion, but the food itself also contributes. The day I got an air quality sensor (to assess risk from wildfire smoke), I realized that my kitchen is basically an asthma factory for the kids. (I haven't actually assessed the risk from that, as its different from wildfires smoke, but j just keep the kids out of the kitchen now until the air clears)
      - jwineinger 4y ago
        I have some air filters with air quality sensors on them, and we have an electric range so there's no natural gas combustion happening. Often when cooking (pan frying especially), those sensors will max out and send the air filters into turbo mode for a good while.
        epistasis 4y ago
        Yes, hot oils trigger the formaldehyde sensor every time for me. For doing wok frying, I got an outdoor propane burner so that it's far more dilute, and that delicious cancer-causing wok hei is delivered only to our stomachs rather than lungs and stomachs. The outdoor wok burner is also far superior to any indoor residential gas stove too for this purpose.
        krallja 4y ago
        The actors at Conner Prairie, an 1836 "living museum" in central Indiana, explain that some of the nicer houses have a separate out-building just for cooking, to keep the heat away from the main living space, and reduce the risk of burning down the whole house too. Maybe we'll move back to that design, to keep the pollution in the main space down.
killjoywashere 4y ago
Before getting too excited about the experimental prevention they used, IL-1B blockade, let me say that blocking the innate immune system to prevent cancer seems ill-advised. The innate immune system is with us for very good reasons. This would be roughly equivalent to preventing table saw accidents by prophylactically removing all fingers. Yes, table saw accidents are terrible, but there is a straightforward electromechanical solution (SawStop), and fingers are useful for many other things. Yes, lung cancer is terrible, but there is a straightforward electromechanical solution (energy from renewables + nuclear), and the innate immune system is useful for many other things.
- sdenton4 4y ago
  Well I read the article and got excited about eliminating internal combustion engines...
  - capitainenemo 4y ago
    https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/business/145130/fine-particular-pollution-from-electric-vehicle-brakes-and-tires-could-become-a-problem-oecd-warns https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/business/145130/fine-part... That won't necessarily solve this problem. [edit] One more source. There are tons though. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/4a4dc6ca-en/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/4a4dc6ca-en https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/4a4dc6ca-en/index.html?i...
    - epistasis 4y ago
      Exactly right, tire and brake dust are still awful with EVs, though contra the slight implication in the headline, it's no worse than the current situation with ICE vehicles. And the brake dust aspect may slightly reduce due to regenerative braking.
      - capitainenemo 4y ago
        "Electric vehicles are estimated to emit 5-19% less PM10 from non-exhaust sources per kilometre than internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) across vehicle classes. However, EVs do not necessarily emit less PM2.5 than ICEVs. Although lightweight EVs emit an estimated 11-13% less PM2.5 than ICEV equivalents, heavier weight EVs emit an estimated 3-8% more PM2.5 than ICEVs" So. It depends. It's sometimes slightly better, sometimes slightly worse. But it doesn't really solve the issue.
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
We seem to be getting a lot of "wake up calls" but no one ever seems to answer the god damn phone.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Seeing how a large portion of the population have never used a wake up call as a service, they just think it is some rude telemarketer calling that just gets added to the block list. Problem solved
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
CodeWriter23 4y ago
Didn’t we know this in the 1970’s?
- the_af 4y ago
  The news here is not that air pollution is linked to cancer, but about what the underlying mechanism could be: > "However, the biological basis for how air pollution causes cancer has remained unclear. Unlike smoking or sun exposure, which directly cause DNA mutations linked to lung and skin cancer, air pollution does not cause cancer by triggering such genetic changes."
- Gatsky 4y ago
  Yeah, PM2.5 is listed as a known carcinogen, and there is strong epidemiological data supporting the link between respiratory tract cancers and pollution. This work provides a mechanism for how this happens, where air pollution promotes the transition of cells into a malignant state, without directly damaging DNA.
- hammock 4y ago
  Yes. At some point though we stopped caring, and moved onto different “pollutants”
- dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
  Yes, but only the older people who have good memory, or the young people who bothered to keep themselves informed by reading some 'history' or talking to smart older people.
randcraw 4y ago
I know essentially nothing about this topic, but it seems likely that some particles are more dangerous than others (though I've seen no suggestion of that). I'd prefer to go after the elephants in the room before the hamsters. There are MULTITUDES of particles in circulation everywhere everyday. If the impact of only some these are especially dire, we should be able to triage each particle simply by: 1) looking at who suffers most from 'lung cancer of unknown etiology' and what environmental particles they were exposed to, and to a lesser extent, 2) looking at who is exposed to each type of particle and whether they suffer from it. It'd be nice if we had some clear hypotheses in mind before charging off in all directions.
- dec0dedab0de 4y ago
  One thing that shocked me about cancer treatment is how little they asked me about environmental factors. I assumed there would be questionnaires asking about all kinds of specific products and foods, maybe even asking for soil and water samples from my home. But there was none of that, and this was a major research hospital. The only thing was that they asked permission to use my biopsy for additional research. I know the data would be messy, and if released to the wild it could lead to sensational news stories that affect the sock market, but surely there is some value in collecting up all this data? How long did it take for glyphosate to be linked to cancer? How much sooner could it have been caught?
  - ashtonbaker 4y ago
    There is the NHANES dataset, which has a ton of blood/urine test data for various environmental contaminants, along with tons of other data columns like cancer diagnoses, age of onset, etc.
hackerlight 4y ago
Will wearing N95 masks when near busy roads help at all?
- hammock 4y ago
  Yes. When I lived in a drafty street level apartment in SF on Oak St (busy artery) I would have to wipe my inside window sills 1-2x a week of the brake dust and black rubber particles that would accumulate
  - hellohowareu 4y ago
    Same here— in the east bay (Milpitas). I was alarmed by how much silt built up on any outdoor surface. I assumed it was due to nearby highways and busy roads. Left that living situation after 2-3 months due to the concern.
  - briefcomment 4y ago
    Wow. Did you feel any ill effects? Did you recover when you moved?
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Similar things happen in the country, but it's dust from gravel roads, and/or from farming (discers, plows, combines, and so on). House can be 100 meters from the road and you still get tons of gravel road dust. Though, perhaps, that's not as bad for you as brake dust. In some corn towns it "snows" crap from the processing plants for part of the year. Can't imagine that's good for the lungs.
ajnin 4y ago
Are all PM2.5 equal ? It seems weird to me to lump into one category various things like car exhaust, wood fires or agricultural emissions.
viktorcode 4y ago
> “The risk of lung cancer from air pollution is lower than from smoking, but we have no control over what we all breathe,” We do, to a degree. If you have air purifiers at home that does help. I can’t recommend them enough.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  > If you have air purifiers at home that does help. Does it? Or does merely having them make you feel more comfortable. Anyway it also means that I would have to live in a tightly sealed building, but I rather like having the window open.
  - viktorcode 4y ago
    They do clean harmful particles from the air, thus providing benefit. Just turn it on after you closed the window.
EricE 4y ago
Is it really the cars that are the problem - or just a high concentration of particles in the air from having so many people and things jammed in a tight space? Dense cities themselves are the real problem. I have started carrying portable air sensors around (they are surprisingly cheap and measure a wide variety of things from particles to VOCs and CO2) and simply not being in or near a large city dramatically improves air quality. But hey, lump everything in and bash cars while you are at it - double bonus :p
- asdff 4y ago
  Remember when the pandemic first started and literally no one was on the roads? I hiked up into the mountains of LA. You could see to long beach and even catalina clear as can be, 50 mile visibility. It stayed like that until traffic started kicking back up again. The same dense city, the only difference was people weren't driving to work and the air was noticeably clearer both to the naked eye, and on purple air. EVs will help some but honestly these days, a lot of particulate pollution cars put out comes from sources like the tires and brake dust. EVs are heavier vehicles overall and would produce more of both for a given class of vehicle. The best thing to do would be to improve service quality of bus transit in order to move more people with fewer vehicles; giving busses signal preemtion and their own lanes would go a long way to make them more convenient than cars for more people. Bike lane networks would also help people feel more confident riding a bike in cities to more places. Not enough people take the lane while biking, certainly.
HereIGoAgain 4y ago
Yeah, it would be much better if we focused on actually curing and treating it... at least in terms of whether we need to redesign our entire society. Also put another way: Oh yay.. more anti-car/mobility propaganda.
- _yasmeen 4y ago
  That's exactly what it is. :)
_yasmeen 4y ago
Climate change propaganda. I know this, because I am in the healthcare industry. No breakthrough happens by changing environments, only by figuring out interventions.

196 points by hammock 4y ago

I wanted to find an account of what the biggest sources of PM2.5 are in the US. This article discusses traffic fumes (24% of PM2.5), but I was surprised to learn that by far, the largest source of PM2.5 - 45% - is “unspecified sources of human origin.” Where does that stuff come from? Well, it’s created in the atmosphere via secondary reactions between agricultural NH3 emissions, SO2 and NOx emissions from shipping and industrial activities and power generation, and NMVOCs from industrial processes and consumption of solvents.[1] Those reactions seem like an interesting area of study and those chemicals involved are far less-often discussed as sources of air pollution even though they seem to combine to form the biggest source [1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1352231015303320 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223101...

zibby8 4y ago
I wonder how important the raw amount of emissions is. Density should decrease at a cubic rate of distance, so being close to a small source of emissions might be worse than being somewhat far from a heavier source.
- projectramo 4y ago
  See for yourself. Propublica plotted a "cancer map" of elevated cancer risks, and you can see how it drops off as you go away from certain points. https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/ https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Interesting. One question totally non-sequiter to the toxicity conversation, but why do people that use maps orient the image in a direction other than North being up so that they have to add a label to the image indicating the direction of North?
    - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
      For local navigation (e.g. your phone screen, laying a map on a table, etc) it's generally considered best practice to orient the map so that North is North. For abstract purposes North is up is the standard. I can't think of a good reason to do otherwise unless you're trying to illustrate a point specifically about local navigation (e.g. orienting a map so that the headwaters of a navigable river are at the top).
  - mrtweetyhack 4y ago
- treis 4y ago
  It's pretty hard to separate correlation from causation. There's way more sources of carcinogens than just car generated pollution. And lots of them will tend to correlate with poverty/working class which will tend to correlate with living next to highways.
rufius 4y ago
The other thing people don’t often talk of is PM2.5 inside their home while cooking. Lot of people have poor ventilation or insufficient air movement capacity in their kitchens.
- mavhc 4y ago
  From the food, or the fuel?
  - epistasis 4y ago
    A lot of it is from the natural gas combustion, but the food itself also contributes. The day I got an air quality sensor (to assess risk from wildfire smoke), I realized that my kitchen is basically an asthma factory for the kids. (I haven't actually assessed the risk from that, as its different from wildfires smoke, but j just keep the kids out of the kitchen now until the air clears)
    - jwineinger 4y ago
      I have some air filters with air quality sensors on them, and we have an electric range so there's no natural gas combustion happening. Often when cooking (pan frying especially), those sensors will max out and send the air filters into turbo mode for a good while.
      - epistasis 4y ago
        Yes, hot oils trigger the formaldehyde sensor every time for me. For doing wok frying, I got an outdoor propane burner so that it's far more dilute, and that delicious cancer-causing wok hei is delivered only to our stomachs rather than lungs and stomachs. The outdoor wok burner is also far superior to any indoor residential gas stove too for this purpose.
        krallja 4y ago
        The actors at Conner Prairie, an 1836 "living museum" in central Indiana, explain that some of the nicer houses have a separate out-building just for cooking, to keep the heat away from the main living space, and reduce the risk of burning down the whole house too. Maybe we'll move back to that design, to keep the pollution in the main space down.

killjoywashere 4y ago

Before getting too excited about the experimental prevention they used, IL-1B blockade, let me say that blocking the innate immune system to prevent cancer seems ill-advised. The innate immune system is with us for very good reasons. This would be roughly equivalent to preventing table saw accidents by prophylactically removing all fingers. Yes, table saw accidents are terrible, but there is a straightforward electromechanical solution (SawStop), and fingers are useful for many other things. Yes, lung cancer is terrible, but there is a straightforward electromechanical solution (energy from renewables + nuclear), and the innate immune system is useful for many other things.

sdenton4 4y ago
Well I read the article and got excited about eliminating internal combustion engines...
- capitainenemo 4y ago
  https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/business/145130/fine-particular-pollution-from-electric-vehicle-brakes-and-tires-could-become-a-problem-oecd-warns https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/business/145130/fine-part... That won't necessarily solve this problem. [edit] One more source. There are tons though. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/4a4dc6ca-en/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/4a4dc6ca-en https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/4a4dc6ca-en/index.html?i...
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Exactly right, tire and brake dust are still awful with EVs, though contra the slight implication in the headline, it's no worse than the current situation with ICE vehicles. And the brake dust aspect may slightly reduce due to regenerative braking.
    - capitainenemo 4y ago
      "Electric vehicles are estimated to emit 5-19% less PM10 from non-exhaust sources per kilometre than internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) across vehicle classes. However, EVs do not necessarily emit less PM2.5 than ICEVs. Although lightweight EVs emit an estimated 11-13% less PM2.5 than ICEV equivalents, heavier weight EVs emit an estimated 3-8% more PM2.5 than ICEVs" So. It depends. It's sometimes slightly better, sometimes slightly worse. But it doesn't really solve the issue.

FollowingTheDao 4y ago

We seem to be getting a lot of "wake up calls" but no one ever seems to answer the god damn phone.

dylan604 4y ago
Seeing how a large portion of the population have never used a wake up call as a service, they just think it is some rude telemarketer calling that just gets added to the block list. Problem solved
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

CodeWriter23 4y ago

Didn’t we know this in the 1970’s?

the_af 4y ago
The news here is not that air pollution is linked to cancer, but about what the underlying mechanism could be: > "However, the biological basis for how air pollution causes cancer has remained unclear. Unlike smoking or sun exposure, which directly cause DNA mutations linked to lung and skin cancer, air pollution does not cause cancer by triggering such genetic changes."
Gatsky 4y ago
Yeah, PM2.5 is listed as a known carcinogen, and there is strong epidemiological data supporting the link between respiratory tract cancers and pollution. This work provides a mechanism for how this happens, where air pollution promotes the transition of cells into a malignant state, without directly damaging DNA.
hammock 4y ago
Yes. At some point though we stopped caring, and moved onto different “pollutants”
dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
Yes, but only the older people who have good memory, or the young people who bothered to keep themselves informed by reading some 'history' or talking to smart older people.

randcraw 4y ago

I know essentially nothing about this topic, but it seems likely that some particles are more dangerous than others (though I've seen no suggestion of that). I'd prefer to go after the elephants in the room before the hamsters. There are MULTITUDES of particles in circulation everywhere everyday. If the impact of only some these are especially dire, we should be able to triage each particle simply by: 1) looking at who suffers most from 'lung cancer of unknown etiology' and what environmental particles they were exposed to, and to a lesser extent, 2) looking at who is exposed to each type of particle and whether they suffer from it. It'd be nice if we had some clear hypotheses in mind before charging off in all directions.

dec0dedab0de 4y ago
One thing that shocked me about cancer treatment is how little they asked me about environmental factors. I assumed there would be questionnaires asking about all kinds of specific products and foods, maybe even asking for soil and water samples from my home. But there was none of that, and this was a major research hospital. The only thing was that they asked permission to use my biopsy for additional research. I know the data would be messy, and if released to the wild it could lead to sensational news stories that affect the sock market, but surely there is some value in collecting up all this data? How long did it take for glyphosate to be linked to cancer? How much sooner could it have been caught?
- ashtonbaker 4y ago
  There is the NHANES dataset, which has a ton of blood/urine test data for various environmental contaminants, along with tons of other data columns like cancer diagnoses, age of onset, etc.

hackerlight 4y ago

Will wearing N95 masks when near busy roads help at all?

hammock 4y ago
Yes. When I lived in a drafty street level apartment in SF on Oak St (busy artery) I would have to wipe my inside window sills 1-2x a week of the brake dust and black rubber particles that would accumulate
- hellohowareu 4y ago
  Same here— in the east bay (Milpitas). I was alarmed by how much silt built up on any outdoor surface. I assumed it was due to nearby highways and busy roads. Left that living situation after 2-3 months due to the concern.
- briefcomment 4y ago
  Wow. Did you feel any ill effects? Did you recover when you moved?
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Similar things happen in the country, but it's dust from gravel roads, and/or from farming (discers, plows, combines, and so on). House can be 100 meters from the road and you still get tons of gravel road dust. Though, perhaps, that's not as bad for you as brake dust. In some corn towns it "snows" crap from the processing plants for part of the year. Can't imagine that's good for the lungs.

ajnin 4y ago

Are all PM2.5 equal ? It seems weird to me to lump into one category various things like car exhaust, wood fires or agricultural emissions.

viktorcode 4y ago

> “The risk of lung cancer from air pollution is lower than from smoking, but we have no control over what we all breathe,” We do, to a degree. If you have air purifiers at home that does help. I can’t recommend them enough.

kwhitefoot 4y ago
> If you have air purifiers at home that does help. Does it? Or does merely having them make you feel more comfortable. Anyway it also means that I would have to live in a tightly sealed building, but I rather like having the window open.
- viktorcode 4y ago
  They do clean harmful particles from the air, thus providing benefit. Just turn it on after you closed the window.

EricE 4y ago

Is it really the cars that are the problem - or just a high concentration of particles in the air from having so many people and things jammed in a tight space? Dense cities themselves are the real problem. I have started carrying portable air sensors around (they are surprisingly cheap and measure a wide variety of things from particles to VOCs and CO2) and simply not being in or near a large city dramatically improves air quality. But hey, lump everything in and bash cars while you are at it - double bonus :p

asdff 4y ago
Remember when the pandemic first started and literally no one was on the roads? I hiked up into the mountains of LA. You could see to long beach and even catalina clear as can be, 50 mile visibility. It stayed like that until traffic started kicking back up again. The same dense city, the only difference was people weren't driving to work and the air was noticeably clearer both to the naked eye, and on purple air. EVs will help some but honestly these days, a lot of particulate pollution cars put out comes from sources like the tires and brake dust. EVs are heavier vehicles overall and would produce more of both for a given class of vehicle. The best thing to do would be to improve service quality of bus transit in order to move more people with fewer vehicles; giving busses signal preemtion and their own lanes would go a long way to make them more convenient than cars for more people. Bike lane networks would also help people feel more confident riding a bike in cities to more places. Not enough people take the lane while biking, certainly.

HereIGoAgain 4y ago

Yeah, it would be much better if we focused on actually curing and treating it... at least in terms of whether we need to redesign our entire society. Also put another way: Oh yay.. more anti-car/mobility propaganda.

_yasmeen 4y ago
That's exactly what it is. :)

_yasmeen 4y ago

Climate change propaganda. I know this, because I am in the healthcare industry. No breakthrough happens by changing environments, only by figuring out interventions.