Excerpt from Super Power Breath­ing — Chap­ter 15
Click book title for more information

Today we for­tu­nately have national and local agen­cies whose job is to prevent…horrible dis­as­ters. They con­stantly mon­i­tor air pol­lu­tant lev­els and atmos­pheric con­di­tions. Based on their find­ings, stronger guide­lines and leg­is­la­tion will likely be imple­mented to pro­tect our health. How­ever prob­lems do per­sist. The Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency (EPA) notes that the num­ber of Amer­i­cans liv­ing in areas that don’t meet air qual­ity stan­dards “was as of 1998 over 120 million.”

Over 64 urban areas don’t meet fed­eral stan­dards of air qual­ity – stan­dards which many say are not safe enough to keep our air healthy! When indus­trial pol­lu­tants and car exhaust react with sun­light dan­ger­ous chem­i­cal reac­tions occur. The most dan­ger­ous of these pro­duces ground-level ozone O3. Ozone, the Earth’s pro­tec­tive layer high above our planet, guards plant and ani­mal life from the sun’s dam­ag­ing ultra­vi­o­let radi­a­tion. Yet at ground-level, where we eat, breathe and live, ozone com­bined with pol­lu­tants is respon­si­ble for smog’s trade­mark “haze.” This has a smoth­er­ing toxic effect on the city dweller on smoggy days caus­ing chok­ing, cough­ing and eye-burning.

In many ways the prob­lem of smog is worse now than 50 years ago. Hope­fully we will never have air pol­lu­tion dis­as­ters on the scale of some in the past. No one wants to live through suf­fer­ing like that of the dis­as­trous Lon­don smog of Decem­ber, 1952. A ther­mal inver­sion set­tled a fog on this great city on the Thames, trap­ping the pol­lu­tants spewed from its heavy indus­tries and thou­sands of chim­neys. Before the cri­sis abated, more than 4,000 peo­ple were dead and count­less had fallen ill. Hos­pi­tals were inun­dated with patients suf­fer­ing from cyanosis, a con­di­tion in which a per­son actu­ally turns blue for want of oxy­gen! Recently, the EPA approved new, more pro­tec­tive air qual­ity standards.

Accord­ing to EPA esti­mates, these new stan­dards will pre­vent “15,000 pre­ma­ture deaths yearly, 350,000 cases of aggra­vated asthma and 1 mil­lion cases of decreased lung func­tion in chil­dren.” Because of these new stan­dards, many cities and urban areas will mon­i­tor air and become more alert to air pol­lu­tion problems.