AIR POLLUTION by Akira Enriquez

It seems that this term is common among almost all of the Filipinos because obviously, we are experiencing this environmental problem which we think impossible to be resolved. But first of all, What is Air Pollution? What does it contain? What human activities causes it? And how can it affect our health?

Air pollution is a mixture of solid particles and gases in the air. Car emissions, chemicals from factories, dust, pollen and mold spores may be suspended as particles. Ozone, a gas, is a major part of air pollution in cities. When ozone forms air pollution, it's also called smog.
Some air pollutants are poisonous. Inhaling them can increase the chance you'll have health problems. People with heart or lung disease, older adults and children are at greater risk from air pollution. Air pollution isn't just outside – the air inside buildings can also be polluted and affect your health.

Most air pollution comes from one human activity: burning fossil fuels—natural gas, coal, and oil—to power industrial processes and motor vehicles. Among the harmful chemical compounds this burning puts into the atmosphere are carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and tiny solid particles—including lead from gasoline additives—called particulates. Between 1900 and 1970, motor vehicle use rapidly expanded, and emissions of nitrogen oxides, some of the most damaging pollutants in vehicle exhaust, increased 690 percent. When fuels are incompletely burned, various chemicals called volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) also enter the air. Pollutants also come from other sources. For instance, decomposing garbage in landfills and solid waste disposal sites emits methane gas, and many household products give off VOCs.

We are exposed to toxic air pollutants in many ways that can pose health risks, such as by:

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  Breathing contaminated air.



• Eating contaminated food products, such as fish from contaminated waters; meat, milk, or eggs from animals that fed on contaminated plants; and fruits and vegetables grown in contaminated soil on which air toxics have been deposited.



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  Drinking water contaminated by toxic air pollutants.



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  Ingesting contaminated soil. Young children are especially vulnerable because they often ingest soil from their hands or from objects they place in their mouths.



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  Touching (making skin contact with) contaminated soil, dust, or water (for example, during recreational use of contaminated water bodies).
  
  
  We may not be that conscious about it that much but we just don’t know how can it affect our health, especially to the younger ones. Here is an article by Anne Harding about how “Air Pollution” can affect even the children whom we can call the victims of our destruction in our Mother Nature:
  

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Kids who live in neighborhoods with heavy traffic pollution have lower IQs and score worse on other tests of intelligence and memory than children who breathe cleaner air, a new study shows.
The effect of pollution on intelligence was similar to that seen in children whose mothers smoked 10 cigarettes a day while pregnant, or in kids who have been exposed to lead, Dr. Shakira Franco Suglia of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, the study's lead author, told Reuters Health.
While the effect of pollution on cardiovascular and respiratory health has been studied extensively, less is known about how breathing dirty air might affect the brain, Suglia and her team write in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
To investigate, she and her colleagues looked at 202 Boston children 8 to 11 years old who were participating in a study of maternal smoking. The researchers related several measures of cognitive function to the children's estimated exposure to black carbon, a component of the particulate matter emitted in automobile and truck exhaust, particularly by diesel vehicles.
The more heavily exposed children were to black carbon, the lower were their scores on several intelligence tests.
When the researchers adjusted for the effects of parents' education, language spoken at home, birth weight, and exposure to tobacco smoke, the association remained.
For example, heavy exposure to black carbon was linked to a 3.4-point drop in IQ, on average. Heavily exposed children also scored lower on tests of vocabulary, memory and learning.
"It's within the range for in utero tobacco exposure and lead exposure," Suglia said in an interview.

With this article, we’ll know how selfish we are to just do whatever we want to with our nature, we just think about ourselves and for our own benefits, without thinking that while we’re doing all of our destructive activities, we’re also destructing other’s lives, especially the young ones that just deserve to live in a better place where they can enjoy the beauty of our nature.

Here are just some of the things that causes and results Air Pollution. I just hope that we’ll not bear in mind that we can’t do anything about it anymore, instead, let’s look on the positive side that we can able to resolve it if we’ll just work hand in hand in bringing out a better place to live in. At present time, there are lots of projects which were made by Filipinos which can help us to solve our problem in terms of the “air pollution” we currently facing, but we just lack the support of our government. Hopefully, we’ll not let these projects be wasted, instead, let us support them because I believe that nothing will happen if we’ll just continue the destructive deeds we used to do. Let us get our off our comfort zone and be ready to fulfill our responsibilities as a protector of our mother nature.

-Akira Enriquez ’08 :)