The Health Toll Of Traffic Jams

As roadways choke on traffic, researchers suspect that the tailpipe exhaust from cars and trucks—especially tiny carbon particles already implicated in heart disease, cancer and respiratory ailments—may also injure brain cells and synapses key to learning and memory.


Columbia University's Frederica Perera discusses the link between exposure to pollutants in the womb and mental impacts in children. Plus, how New York City - one of the most congested cities in the U.S. - is improving traffic flow.

New public-health studies and laboratory experiments suggest that, at every stage of life, traffic fumes exact a measurable toll on mental capacity, intelligence and emotional stability. "There are more and more scientists trying to find whether and why exposure to traffic exhaust can damage the human brain," says medical epidemiologist Jiu-Chiuan Chen at the University of Southern California who is analyzing the effects of traffic pollution on the brain health of 7,500 women in 22 states. "The human data are very new."

online.wsj.com...
Well this comes as no surprise really. In the 10 most congested areas of the country a person sits for 140 hours per month in traffic. Even though the emissions of todays vehicles are 1/10th what they were in the 70's, the sheer numbers of vehicles out there still create enough pollution for measurable health concerns.
I live in the country so I guess I am a little sensitive to the fumes because when I visit town, getting behind just one car with visible emissions gives me a headache and agitates me.

Recent studies show that breathing street-level fumes for just 30 minutes can intensify electrical activity in brain regions responsible for behavior, personality and decision-making, changes that are suggestive of stress, scientists in the Netherlands recently discovered. Breathing normal city air with high levels of traffic exhaust for 90 days can change the way that genes turn on or off among the elderly; it can also leave a molecular mark on the genome of a newborn for life, separate research teams at Columbia University and Harvard University reported this year.

Children in areas affected by high levels of emissions, on average, scored more poorly on intelligence tests and were more prone to depression, anxiety and attention problems than children growing up in cleaner air,

Great, now it can effect us psychologically and mentally too. One more thing to worry about...

To study the effect of exhaust on expectant mothers, Frederica Perera at Columbia University's Center for Children's Environmental Health began in 1998 to equip hundreds of pregnant women with personal air monitors to measure the chemistry of the air they breathed. As the babies were born, Dr. Perera and colleagues discovered a distinctive biochemical mark in the DNA of about half of the infants, left by prenatal exposure to high levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in exhaust.

By age 3, the children who bore the mark of exhaust in their genes were developing mental capacities fractionally more slowly. By age 5, their IQ scores averaged about four points lower on standard intelligence tests than those of less exposed children, the team reported in 2009. The differences, while small, were significant in terms of later educational development, the researchers said.

By age 7, the children were more likely to show symptoms of anxiety, depression and attention problems, the researchers reported this year in Environmental Health Perspectives.

Man, our biology is faced with so many challenges, I hope what doesn't kill us makes us stronger, and with today's pollution, we may all be toxic supermen before it's all over, or just die off slowly and become sterile.
I have wondered if there can be some type of filter to add to our exhaust to help minimize the emissions, beyond a catalytic convertor.
Is this our future?


Peace,
spec

Sure is quiet in here, guess there is enough doom-n-gloom to ponder today.
Still though, avoid infants exposure to long traffic jams if possible eh?