What should we do to protect our health from the air pollution killing spree?
When people are cold, they wear a scarf and gloves. A bit more than 1 000 people die from hypothermia in the US per year.
When they are hot, they wear a cap. Heatwave can kill a lot sometimes, 70 000 during a recent one in Europe.
To protect their feets, they wear shoes. (Did not found stats saying that not wearing shoes kills, sorry).
To do bicycle, they wear a helmet. To do motorbike, they have a motorcycle vest and a helmet. Half of 1,25 million people dying on roads each year are driving motorbikes, bikes or walking persons.
Terrorism is a huge society issue. 32 000 people were killed from it in 2014.
Malaria killed 438 000 persons in 2015. We fight hard against this.
Same thing for AIDS. 1,2 million people died from it in 2014.
Same thing for bad water, 2 million die from it every year.
What do we do to protect our health from pollution? 6,5 million people could die every year due to air pollution (or 5.5, another source)
As individuals, almost nothing.
We don't adapt our lives to avoid pollution peak (how many runners run in the middle of dangerous peaks).
We don't wear masks. Except some bikers, I've rarely seen people with masks, except in Asia, but they are not anti-pollution masks.
We rarely have an air filtering system at home.
We don't track peaks and monitor where we live's air quality using apps such as Plume.
Some laws are supposed to protect us and lower pollution. That's it.
What should we do, from easy to complex:
When they are hot, they wear a cap. Heatwave can kill a lot sometimes, 70 000 during a recent one in Europe.
To protect their feets, they wear shoes. (Did not found stats saying that not wearing shoes kills, sorry).
To do bicycle, they wear a helmet. To do motorbike, they have a motorcycle vest and a helmet. Half of 1,25 million people dying on roads each year are driving motorbikes, bikes or walking persons.
Terrorism is a huge society issue. 32 000 people were killed from it in 2014.
Malaria killed 438 000 persons in 2015. We fight hard against this.
Same thing for AIDS. 1,2 million people died from it in 2014.
Same thing for bad water, 2 million die from it every year.
What do we do to protect our health from pollution? 6,5 million people could die every year due to air pollution (or 5.5, another source)
As individuals, almost nothing.
We don't adapt our lives to avoid pollution peak (how many runners run in the middle of dangerous peaks).
We don't wear masks. Except some bikers, I've rarely seen people with masks, except in Asia, but they are not anti-pollution masks.
We rarely have an air filtering system at home.
We don't track peaks and monitor where we live's air quality using apps such as Plume.
Some laws are supposed to protect us and lower pollution. That's it.
What should we do, from easy to complex:
- Install Plume and activate notifications.
- Avoid doing sports or going out with babies during pollution peaks.
- Buy an air filtering device at home.
- Wear a mask when you do sport or when pollution is high, even if it's a bit strange.
- Live where pollution is low (already asked Plume guys to build a system of label to distinguish cities making efforts to limit air pollution :p)
- Do lobbying to reinforce anti-air-pollution actions.