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1. Air Pollution Raises Blood Pressure According to New Study

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'SuperBug' Concern at New York Schools
(Source: Associated Press)

Public schools in Mount Vernon are being disinfected after a worker and a student showed signs of an antibiotic-resistant staph infection, authorities said. Schools Superintendent W. L. Tony Sawyer said a high school employee and a third-grade student are being tested for MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. The bacterial strain can be treated with other antibiotics, but without treatment it can be deadly. Sawyer said the two will stay home from the schools Edward Williams Elementary and Nelson Mandela Community High until the test results are known. Sawyer said that if either tests positive, the school system will redouble its efforts to disinfect. But medical authorities have said the schools will not need to close, he said. The bacteria was blamed for the death of a 17-year-old Virginia high school senior and a 12-year-old New York City middle school student this month.

At least seven students on New York's Long Island were recently diagnosed with MRSA, as were 10 members of an athletic team at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y. However, a government report has estimated it may sicken more than 90,000 Americans.

Fox News: Staph Blamed for Brooklyn Boy's Death
(Source:Associated Press)

NEW YORK - School officials urged parents to report any signs of antibiotic-resistant staph infections after a middle-school student apparently died of the "superbug." But city health officials said there was "no reason to believe that other children or school employees are at increased risk," saying deadly staph infections were unusual outside health care settings. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, or MRSA, have gained attention since a government report this month found more than 90,000 Americans get potentially deadly staph infections each year. The bacteria can be carried by healthy people, living on their skin or in their noses. Most drug-resistant staph cases are mild skin infections, but severe infections can enter the bloodstream or destroy flesh and become deadly. The bacteria don't respond to penicillin-related antibiotics once commonly used to treat them, partly because of overuse. They can be treated with other drugs.

California Air Pollution Found to Kill 24,000 A Year - by: David Gutierrez
(Source: L.A. Times)

Particulate pollution from the burning of fossil fuels kills 24,000 people per year in California, according to the newest figures from the California Air Resources Board. This is nearly three times higher than the 8,200 people previously believed by the state to die each year. "Our report concludes these particles are 70 percent more dangerous than previously thought, based on several major studies that have occurred in the last five years," said the board's chief researcher, Bart Croes. Airborne particulate matter consists of microscopic particles that cause damage deep in the lungs. California already has the lowest allowed threshold in the world for the pollutants, but researchers say that there are no safe levels. State researchers reviewed several large studies, including one conducted by the University of Southern California, on 23,000 people in the greater Los Angeles area, and one conducted by the American Cancer Society on 300,000 people across the United States. They found that exposure to even very small levels of fine particulate exponentially increased people's risks of heart attacks, strokes and other diseases. Exposure to high levels reduced the life of the average Californian by 10 years. "These numbers are shocking; they're incredible," said Tim Carmichael, senior policy director of the California nonprofit Coalition for Clean Air. While it is not possible to attribute any individual death to particulate pollution, which instead raises the risk of death from other diseases, the Air Resources Board emphasized that a clear pattern emerges of increased risk with increased exposure. Even temporary decreases in exposure, the researchers found, drastically cut death rates. "When Dublin imposed a coal ban, when Hong Kong imposed reductions in sulfur dioxide, when there was a steel mill strike in Utah ... they saw immediate reductions in deaths," Croes said. "There's no death certificate that says specifically someone died of air pollution, but cities with higher rates of air pollution have much greater rates of death from cardiovascular diseases," he said.

Two million people a year killed by air pollution, says WHO - by: Jessica Frase
(multiple sources - independent article)

According to new research examined by the World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution in cities around the world causes roughly 2 million premature deaths each year. Yesterday members of the WHO's special program for health and the environment urged worldwide nations to adopt strict air pollution laws aimed at significantly reducing harmful levels of particulate matter, ozone and sulfur dioxide. "By reducing air pollution levels, we can help countries to reduce the global burden of disease from respiratory infections, heart disease, and lung cancer, which they otherwise would be facing," said Maria Neira, WHO director of public health and the environment. "Moreover, action to reduce the direct impact of air pollution will also cut emissions of gases which contribute to climate change and provide other health benefits." The WHO warned that in order for some cities to meet its recommendations, levels of pollution would need to be cut by as much as three fold. Because many countries currently lack any air pollution standards and many countries are still developing, the WHO acknowledged its guidelines could be difficult to follow. The organization's recommendations include reducing levels of particulate matter -- known as PM10 and produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels -- to 10 to 20 micrograms per cubic meter. Many cities currently have PM10 levels in excess of 70 micrograms per cubic meter. PM10 has been linked to respiratory illness and heart disease, and the WHO says reducing these harmful particulate matter levels can reduce deaths from air pollution by 15 percent per year. The daily limit for ozone -- a key component of smog -- will be reduced from 120 micrograms per cubic meter to 100 micrograms. The WHO notes that this reduction could be problematic for many cities, especially those with a high number of sunny days, when ozone concentrations are high and cause asthma attacks and other respiratory problems. Finally, the organization recommends cutting levels of sulfur dioxide from 125 micrograms per cubic meter to 20 micrograms. Cutting this pollutant would result in fewer childhood diseases and deaths, the researchers say. Dr. Roberto Bertollini, European director of WHO's health and environment program, said the new guidelines represent the "most widely agreed and up-to-date assessment of health effects of air pollution, recommending targets for air quality at which the health risks are significantly reduced."

"Particles are Tiny, but Damage can be Great" - by James Glanz
(Source: New York Times)

Until anthrax spores started spreading through the mail, few people gave much thought to the minuscule particles that drift almost invisibly in the atmosphere, infiltrate buildings and plunge deep into lungs. Not so for environmental scientists, who have spent decades studying the physics and physiology of particles very much like those in the most dangerous forms of biological weaponry. From the coal dust that causes black lung disease to the bacteria-laden droplets that spread Legionnaires' disease to second- hand cigarette smoke and plain old air pollution, particles from about 0.05 microns to 10 or 20 microns in size have long been at the focus of those scientists' attention. A micron is a millionth of a meter, or an inch divided into 25,400 parts. Those tiny particles crop up in environmental science and germ weaponry for virtually identical reasons. Once released, particles of that size can stay aloft almost indefinitely and seep into poorly sealed buildings, greatly increasing the chances of the particles' being inhaled by people. What is more, the peculiar microscopic physics shared by all those particles makes it certain that some of them, within a highly specific range of sizes, will be able to slip past protective nose hairs, avoid sticky bronchial walls and be deposited in the deepest reaches of the lungs, where great damage can be done. "A particle is a particle," said Dr. Joe Mauderly, a toxicologist at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in Albuquerque, where he is director of the National Environmental Respiratory Center. What pathogen the particle may be carrying has almost nothing to do with where it ends up. "The fact that this is a biological issue doesn't really change the behavior of the particles in the building, or the respiratory deposition," said Dr. William Nazaroff, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. Once the particle does land, its exact composition - whether it is harmless, chemically toxic or biologically infectious - comes very much into play. Of course, much is known about that process too, especially through studies of Legionnaires', tuberculosis and other bacterial diseases that are transmitted through the air on particles that are, not coincidentally, a few microns in size. The existence of all this knowledge, freely available in unclassified literature, is double-edged, the scientists say. It may sap germ warfare of some of its mysteriousness, but it also shows how widely available much of the information needed to design the weaponry is. For many environmental scientists, who in recent years have been warning that pollution particles of that size pose a special danger to human health if they come indoors, the bioterrorism threat is one more reason to improve the quality of indoor air with powerful filters and other methods. That proposal, like any that could lead to new regulations on industry, is bound to be controversial, especially since buildings have been constructed to be less leaky to outside air and ventilation systems have been improved in recent years. So some researchers are suggesting that further improvements be voluntary. "We should get the insurance companies to lower your life insurance slightly if you have approved equipment," said Dr. Matthew S. Meselson, a professor of biology and bioweapons expert at Harvard. Specific health effects aside, what is not controversial is the physics of the tiny particles. Human airways act as a kind of sorting machine to allow only particles of certain sizes to reach the deepest part of the lungs - the breathing sacs, or alveoli. The bronchial tubes of the lungs have a treelike structure, branching from a few airways that are centimeters wide at the top to millions of smaller ones, each a fraction of a millimeter across, deep in the lungs. At the end of each branch are tiny alveoli, each perhaps 50 microns across, said Dr. Charles H. Hobbs, director of toxicology at Lovelace. "You could just barely see them," Dr. Hobbs said. "It's half the size of a human hair." The total surface of area of those little sacs, where blood capillaries exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide, is roughly the same as that of a tennis court. And a particle's fate is generally very different depending on whether it rides an airstream all the way to an alveoli or hits the wall of a bronchial tube before then. That is because the bronchial walls are coated with mucus and ciliary, or hairlike, cells. Any particle that strikes the wall gets stuck, and a wavelike motion of the cilia can move it back up the tract like an escalator to the mouth. There, the particle is swallowed and digested. "Once a particle is swallowed, it's as if you ate it instead of breathed it," said Dr. Mauderly of Lovelace. "You do this all the time and are never aware of it." But a particle that makes it all the way to the alveoli can, under the right circumstances, cause more mischief. Each sac is often guarded by a single scavenger cell, or macrophage. There, a bit of coal dust could insinuate itself into lung tissue, potentially leading to a stiffening of the lungs called fibrosis. Unless the macrophages win their battle, disease-causing bacteria begin doing their damage in the same sacs. It is there, for example, that an anthrax spore would be taken up by a macrophage, which would carry it elsewhere to germinate and begin to produce the toxins that can lead to inhalation anthrax. "Your lung," said Dr. Morton Lippmann, a professor of environmental medicine at New York University medical school, "is a very good culture medium - you can get enormous replication and damage to the lung." To have that chance, the invading particles must avoid destruction at the hands of the ciliary escalator. Whether they succeed depends not on their biological potency or chemical toxicity, but largely on their size. Relatively large particles like pollen are stopped almost before they begin the journey. Those particles, generally around 20 microns in size, often are stopped by the coarse filter formed by hairs in the nose. Particles in the next size range - say, 5 to 15 microns - may slip past the nose and survive farther into the journey once they are inhaled. Fly ash from incinerators and some auto pollution falls into that range. But those particles eventually have trouble negotiating the increasingly narrow airways. In a process called impaction, the particles can fail to be carried around a sharp corner by an airstream, like a truck that skids on a wet roadway that poses no problem for a sports car. Other particles in that range can be pulled downward by gravity. In either case, the particles hit the walls and are stopped. However, extremely fine particles, much smaller than a micron, are also stopped high in the system of bronchial tubes. That is because when air molecules strike those particles, they are so small that the impacts knock them into a diffusive dance that eventually ends up, as with any bad dancer, against the wall. What is left is at least one optimum range, roughly between one and five microns, that has a good chance of going all the way to the breathing sacs. How the particles may spread through a room or building once they are released is no less complex, Dr. Nazaroff said. Consider, for example, the anthrax-carrying letter that was opened in Senator Tom Daschle's office in the Hart Senate Office Building. Dr. Nazaroff said that within a minute or two, particles released from the envelope could be spread throughout the air in the room by processes most people are scarcely aware of. Plumes of warm air are constantly rising off people, who in that respect are "roughly equivalent to a 75-watt light bulb," he said. Other currents driven by ventilation or temperature variations near window help spread the particles. The ventilation system can help spread particles, too. Air often is blown directly into offices from vents, but is drawn away through intake vents in the hallways, Dr. Nazaroff said. That means the particles can migrate down halls and into nearby offices before being sucked in, or even slip straight through walls if there are tiny air pressure differences in adjacent offices. Those processes could explain why two workers in an office next to Mr. Daschle's later showed evidence of exposure. Outside of the specific pathogen involved, the physics of how particles of any kind float in air and soar through the lungs explains much about biological weapons. "In a nutshell, the particles not only have to be small," said Richard Spertzel, a former weapons inspector and biologist for the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq. "They have to be small enough so that they are capable of staying airborne, and also they have to be small in order to get down into the lungs."