Harmful substances in the environment can affect people in unexpected ways.
Rapists ripen in a tainted atmosphere
From ruined nature in general and spoiled air in particular to health - nothing good. One harm. Direct. Simply from the fact that people breathe all sorts of filth that poisons their life. But, as it turned out, there is also an indirect threat. It was identified by American scientists from the Minnesota School of Public Health and Colorado State University in a gigantic study that involved 86.1 million people in more than 300 US regions over 13 years.
Study leader Jesse Berman and her colleagues looked for a link between the air pollutants in an area and the crime rate there. It was suspected that she must be - at least some kind of connection. And so it turned out. This was evidenced by the criminal statistics provided by the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation). Scientists scientists "superimposed" on it the environmental data obtained from the Environmental Protection Agency (Environmental Protection Agency. They compared one with the other and saw: in fact, people more often committed crimes where the air was dirtier.) Theft was approximately the same, and the crime situation was significantly aggravated by unlawful acts connected with violence.
The revealed pattern did not fully satisfy the researchers. After all, it could happen that this or that level of crime was simply characteristic of some area - unfavorable in the ecological sense. They analyzed the data over time. After that, there was no longer any doubt. It was clearly traced: at a time when the air was getting dirtier, the number of murders, rapes, grievous bodily harm - that is, crimes that harm health - increased. Sometimes irreparable.
The more dirt, the angrier the extremists and their opponents.
Berman and colleagues report in the journal Epidemiology: “Violent crime, whether the neighborhood is poor or wealthy, is increasing by 1.17 percent per day with an increase in particulate matter concentration of 10 micrograms per cubic meter and 0.59 percent in day - if there is more ozone. At least 10 ppb.
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Researchers “sin” on diesel engine exhaust, saturated with particles of manganese and mercury. They say they somehow affect the brain. After all, not only people become restless and aggressive, but also pets - they bite more often.
Berman and his colleagues are confident that they have found "evidence of acute neurological and behavioral health effects of air pollution." Next, they intend to deal with the mechanisms of this effect, which are not yet clear.
The dust is crazy
The hypothesis that dust primarily affects the brain was confirmed by scientists from the University of Chicago, led by Atif Khan and Andrey Rzhetsky. They also used the services of the US Environmental Protection Agency. But the environmental data obtained there was compared with medical data received from US insurance organizations. They provided information about the health of more than 150 million people.
It turned out that the dirtier the air, the more psychos - specifically people with mental illnesses - bipolar disorder, severe depression, personality disorder, schizophrenia. And also neurological ailments - epilepsy and Parkinson's disease. In other "dirty" areas, the mentally ill of this or that "profile" was as much as one third more than in the "clean".
Map of the distribution of dirty and clean places in the United States.
In Europe, the situation is still narrower. For some reason, researchers drew attention to Denmark - they looked closely at the ailments of about 1.5 million people who lived there from 1979 to 2002. And then they wrote in the journal PLOS Biology, which Bild refers to:
“There were 50 percent more cases of severe depression in areas with the most polluted air than in clean regions. The risk for personality disorders was increased by 162 percent and for schizophrenia by 148 percent. Bipolar disorder was 24 percent more common in areas with polluted air.”
Places in the USA where certain psychos are more common.
The researchers explain the difference by the genetic difference between Europeans and Americans - they say, some are more sensitive to environmental pollution than others. In the sense of the psyche.
Dusty map of the world: what is "lighter" the country, the less particulate matter in the atmosphere above it. Russia is not the most dusty country, but we still have dust.
THAT'S NOT ALL
Difficulty memorizing
Scientists at the University of Warwick have found that dirty air also knocks off memory. People living in disadvantaged areas lose it as if they are aging - sometimes by 10 years, according to the Daily Mail.
Risk of pregnancy complications
The Chinese, after conducting their own research, came to the conclusion that the dust in the air provokes miscarriages in the first three months of pregnancy.
Le Figaro cites Peking University researchers who studied the medical records of 255,000 local women: “Particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter can penetrate the placenta and irreversibly damage the fetus during critical periods of its development. And polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons - substances that get into the air from various industrial sources, smoke - including cigarette, car exhaust, are able to bind to DNA and change it."
On the streets of big cities, you can increasingly see people who cover their noses and mouths with masks. Intuition…
People who take care of their mental and physical health try to protect themselves from dust.
VLADIMIR LAGOVSKY
