Hot on the heels of the Pill news yesterday, today we have the amazing news that children who live near freeways and in heavily polluted areas have more lung problems than kids who live in less polluted areas. Wow, where you live is as important as other health factors.
Well, DUH!
There was a study of children in Southern California, but it’s same for any area with ‘fine particle’ pollution. My hometown, Knoxville, TN has horrible air pollution due to its valley location and GA Southern’s nasty ass coal plants that pollute the whole region. Knoxville also sits directly east of Oak Ridge TN where the fuel for the atomic bombs of the Manhattan Project was refined in the 40s and the subsequent radioactive carcinogens were unceremoniously dumped into the lakes or buried. Hey, it was the 40s and it was a war. No one gave a rat’s ass about polluting the area. It was only hillbillies anyway, right?
I’ve been telling my mother for years that living in an area with heavy pollution in both ground water and the air is not helping them with their health conditions and may be the reason for them. Cancer kills most people in my family and emphysema is rampant [smokers and non]. But if I so much as allude to the pollution of the area my mother will go on a rampage about how it is NOT East Tennessee causing problems it’s just bad luck. She goes ballistic if I bring up pollution and its ill effects on people who are raised in it.
I don’t understand her defensiveness over a plain fact: East Tennessee is a very polluted area. Its smog is as thick as L.A.’s. I know, I took flying lessons there and flew in it! The Atomic Museum [It’s now called the American Museum of Science and Energy. More politically correct, I suppose.] in Oak Ridge has a room FULL of wall panels listing all the nasty crap that has been buried and/or dumped in the area since the 40s! It’s a FACT: East TN is horribly polluted. It’s also a fact that this pollution was done by the government and kept secret for decades. I think it was the 90s when the lists were declassified and the public was allowed to know which horrible chemicals they had been drinking for years. When I looked at 1965 I was shocked at the list of carcinogens and other nasty stuff that had been buried and gotten into the water table. It was very scary. The list went way into the 70s and the chemicals listed sounded pretty damn dangerous. They kindly included a list of diseases caused by each and every chemical that had been dumped. Very considerate of them. It was SO NICE to read that I’d been exposed to at least 6 carcinogens. Yah.
I’ve resigned myself to the fact that my cells have already been damaged by growing up in East TN. I probably will end up with some sort of cancer. Which is why I’m not too worried about smoking. YES, it’s bad for me, but so is growing up drinking carcinogens and breathing pollution every day. Hell’s bells, Atlanta’s pollution is on par with L.A.’s just like its traffic. Every heard of a PURPLE pollution day? I have. Several times. Tell me that is any worse than smoking a ciggie?
Which is why we are looking at places to live that have substantially less pollution (amongst other criteria). We want clean air and water and less attitude, basically. We really want to live somewhere CLEAN. I worry about our overall longterm health and although smoking and drinking is not “healthy”, I feel that pollution is a more dangerous 24/7 kind of unhealthy. And I will stop smoking eventually. There’s really no reason to do it now other than habit and stress.
In any case, this whole post is about how people simply refuse to acknowledge that WHERE you live has a definite impact on your overall well being. It does.
DUH.