
Studies show Alzheimer’s occurs more often in people exposed to polluted air - laurex
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-new-alzheimers-air-pollution-link/
======
vosper
A lot of people - who've become inured to the air pollution they live in -
have suddenly seen what clear skies and clean air looks like. Air pollution is
a huge public health issue, with all sorts of deleterious effects.

Hopefully, when business restarts and the air goes back to being mucky poison
in many places people will think a little more about what has been traded off
for the economic benefits of cities and industrialisation.

~~~
synaesthesisx
This is a polarizing opinion, but as someone who exclusively drives electric I
firmly support phasing out, and eventually banning consumer gas vehicles. A
more realistic approach to do so would be to increase incentives - in the form
of rebates for both new and used vehicles, as well as rebates for charging
infrastructure.

~~~
arijun
This is a more polarizing opinion, but as someone who doesn't own a car I
firmly support removing private cars from many cities altogether. Make anyone
who wants to come in or out park outside the city and take public
transport/bikes within the city. There are so many benefits including:

\- Greatly reduced air and noise polution

\- Much more pedestrian friendly, walkable streets

\- Put the enormous amount of land reserved for parking in these expensive
areas to better use

\- Fewer pedestrian deaths

If you look at experiments like Barcelona, these types of changes usually
result in resounding success.

~~~
jstanley
Both your comment and the one you're replying to are perfect examples of
people advocating for the banning of things that _they don 't want to do_,
which I always find unconvincing.

It's easy to advocate to ban a thing if you don't do the thing! You see all
the negatives of other people doing it without receiving any of the positives
of doing it yourself.

You find it easy to ban because you would not be personally affected.

Personally, as someone who doesn't own a pet, it would be easy for me to
firmly support the banning of all pets from many cities on the basis that they
poo in public and attack people. That would be easy to support not because
it's the right thing to do (which it might be!), but because I don't own a
pet.

~~~
Theodores
It takes effort to not own a car. Not owning a dog requires no effort.

~~~
ourlordcaffeine
>It takes effort to not own a car

Much less true in some European cities though. I don't have a car and I can't
say it's taken effort to not have.

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2sk21
Given the current COVID-19 crisis, this statement really staid out

"But chronic exposure to polluted air can result in the overproduction of
proinflammatory cytokines and chronic inflammation that leads to nerve cell
death."

As many readers are probably aware, overstimulation of cytokines seems to
cause the dreaded second phase of deterioration in covid-19 patients.

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christophilus
A bit tangental, but one of the effects of the COVID situation has been to
show me how dirty the air was previously. I live in a pretty clean place to
begin with, but the sky has never been so blue. It's usually crossed with jet
contrails, but it also usually has a bit of a haze that I hadn't really
noticed until it was gone.

On a similar note, I find my stress levels are significantly different when
walking in city blocks where cars are banned vs walking on sidewalks alongside
any kind of traffic. Double the stress, if you have kids with you.

~~~
s5300
Genuinely curious - is it really more clean though? Or is it just more visibly
clear to humans (obviously, that is due to a reduction in pollution, but just
how much?)

I'm just basing this thought off of waterways in Italy and such. When all the
pictures of "unpolluted waterways" were going around... it's not that there
was a drastic reduction in pollution. It's just that the silt hadn't been
disturbed by boats/other man made things.

 _Very_ huge issue in diving - some famous cave divers have claimed that's
typically the cause of their most near-death situations.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silt_out](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silt_out)

~~~
kaybe
It is, you can probably check the plots from your local air pollution
measurements.

(Of course, in isolation that means nothing since the values are influenced
heavily by weather, eg wind direction, but in aggregate and in comparison to
the past you can interpret it.)

It is also especially obvious in satellite images (for those pollutants that
can easily measured by satellite). Eg. the NO2 concentrations have gone down
significantly in many areas of the world.

eg.

[https://www.space.com/nasa-satellite-air-pollution-us-
northe...](https://www.space.com/nasa-satellite-air-pollution-us-northeast-
coronavirus.html)

but you can easily look for more.

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GoToRO
We are under siege from all sides. The air we breathe, the food we eat, the
house in which we live, noise polution, stress, lack of real comunities.

~~~
onefuncman
What's your plan?

~~~
partyboat1586
One long term solution is to have more self sustaining communities. Local
food, local business and electric vehicles run from local renewable energy
(wind/solar, still connected to the grid for efficiency).

That's great and all but only weird eco people like me and the commenter above
you would actually want to live there. There are massive tradeoffs. First
there are all the usual tradeoffs of not living in a city but there is also
less variety of food due to reduced imports. It would take longer to get
specialist goods and services and travel time to say a medical specialist
would be longer. The other issue is that it's hard to have a cohesive
community if you have the wrong ratio of different existing cultures. If you
have half one culture and half another you get a fractured community. You need
either a massively mixed diverse community or a monoculture. I'd opt for the
former with an emphasis on maintaining diversity instead of sliding into a
grey goo world culture. But even then I don't know because I don't study those
kind of social issues.

The cultural problems, education and attitude problems are much harder to fix
than the technical challenges. The draw of shiny stuff and tribalism is too
much. That's where I don't think anyone has a solution. I just hope the next
generation can figure that one out.

~~~
Retric
Shipping need not have a significant environmental impact. Electric trains to
electric trucks works. Boats need minimal fuel and can supplement with wind
and solar power.

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mensetmanusman
These links are great to understand and discover. Smart policy makers would
start integrating these hidden costs and adding them as taxes to
products/processes that contribute to PM2.5. To make it politically viable, do
it the Canadian way and give the tax payments right back to the tax payers.
It’s essentially a free way to help society make better decisions.

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WalterBright
One thing is to add a HEPA filter to your dwelling's HVAC system.

~~~
radu_floricica
Ahh, people with HVACs, how I envy them. None available for an apartment,
unfortunately. There are several things you want covered, and nothing short of
a full HVAC covers them:

\- heating/cooling

\- ventilation (bring air from outside to lower CO2 and VOCs

\- ideally, heat recovering system for ventilation

\- air purifier for P10, P2.5, pollen and so on

\- if I could pay extra for a professional humidifier that doesn't need
refiling, I definitely would. Not a must, but a VERY nice to have.

You can find aircons with "hepa" filters (I wouldn't trust them to cross the
street though). You do NOT find aircons with ventilation. Yeah, they all say
they do ventilation, but that just means they work as a fan, they do not bring
air from the outside. You can find air purifiers, even very good ones, but
they purify the air already inside - open a window and it's full reset. Plenty
of good air humidifiers, if you have the patience to refill them every two
days.

I sometimes fantasize what it would be like to cobble a system together. Most
of what's missing is a heat recovery ventilation, but that's awkward as fuck
to add in an apartment.

~~~
WalterBright
One thing you can do is:

1\. get a box fan

2\. get a furnace HEPA filter

3\. tape the filter over the fan

4\. turn it on!

~~~
kube-system
You can skip step 3. The negative pressure on the inlet side of the fan is
plenty enough to hold the filter to the side of the fan. The common square box
fans sold in North America work perfectly with a 20x20 furnace filter.

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nnain
I really don’t know how to trust such research anymore. Delhi and nearby areas
have serious air pollution Issue (Actually large part of the north India belt
going upto Pakistan has a problem with dusty air, especially in winters), but
Alzheimer’s is not a serious issue here.

~~~
adrianN
What's the life expectancy in Delhi, and for what fraction of their lives have
old people in Delhi been exposed to the high levels of air pollution?

~~~
nnain
See this is the slight, unnecessary, condescending attitude in west. Life
expectancy in India is fine in people who can afford ok food and place to
live. There’s a lot of poverty and poor people seemingly have lower life
expectancy, which lowers the avg. And yeah pollution would have an effect, but
it’s definitely not like people die early so we don’t have data on
Alzheimer’s. My grandparents lived past 80, and only one of them took some
diabetes medicine. Otherwise they weren’t dependant on drugs till their last
years.

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Nasrudith
I wonder if this is conflating industrialization's pollution with the actual
diagnosis of Alzheimer's. The rural psychologist shortage is well known. We
saw similar crank claims for autism but it wasn't rising, just being better
diagnosised.

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goblin89
I wonder whether people who have lived most of their life in, say, Glasgow
would show lower incidence of Alzheimer’s, if it’s linked to PM2.5.

I use AirVisual and randomly added a few cities in addition to my current
location. Among those I have Glasgow, which is reliably showing very green
readings of US AQI (often 10 or less).

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KKKKkkkk1
Nicholas Nassim Taleb has a nice YouTube clip that shows how this kind of
studies comes about.

The Randomness of Correlation and its Hacking by Bigdataists
[https://youtu.be/D6CxfBMUf1o?t=208](https://youtu.be/D6CxfBMUf1o?t=208)

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Zenst
Certainly many in their 50's would of been exposed more to lead from car
emissions until the shift to reduce that took place. Which is an aspect when
looking at peoples health as it is not just the environment they live in now,
but also the past.

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kalium-xyz
Better train networks when?

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king_panic
Remember five days ago when herpes was linked to Alzheimers?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23094317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23094317)

~~~
adrianN
It's almost as if neurodegenerative diseases are poorly understood and can
have many causes, because we're not even sure that what we're calling
"Alzheimers" is a single disease.

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the_dripper
Its kind of funny but also terrifying how the human race is ending itself.

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aaron695
I don't think we really need anymore evidence PM2.5 is bad?

I don't think you should need this article to change your mind on anything?

I think we are by far at the stage were we need influencers to be paid to
start pushing it.

Clean air in the house, which will then move to clean air outside, since the
rich also have to walk outdoors. (And by rich I mean Westerners visiting
developing countries, for example)

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JordanFarmer
Yet moderate smokers of 40+ years have no higher risk than non smokers...
Strange (just ask my 96yo grandmother who smoked for 42yrs and is still sharp
as a pin mentally)

There are a lot of other bad things that the people in Mexico city are exposed
to. Why blame Alzheimer's on air pollution???

Oh, wait... thought Herpes got in the brain and caused it...

Scientists don't have a clue what really causes it (yet they have many clues).
Probably 1,000 different things which affect 1,000 different people , well
differently.

