With the ever rising urbanization and industrialization trends, air pollution levels have reached to alarming levels creating havoc on living beings’ health and wellness. Adding to this, the hotter the earth gets, the tougher it is going to be to keep air pollution down to a certain level without strict control over the sources of aerosols. As per a study 9 out of 10 people breath air containing high level of pollutants such as carbon, which penetrates deep into lungs and is very harmful for health. A similar statement came into limelight further estimating that around 7 million people die due to the breathing of air with fine particles present in it and end up from suffering from heart disease, stroke, COPD, lung cancer, respiratory infections and so on.
According to a study by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Institute of Public Health and School of Medicine, children in low-income areas in Baltimore tended to have more asthma symptoms as levels of the synthetic chemical BPA (Bisphenol A) in urine increased. Some products, including baby bottles, no longer contain BPA, but exposure to BPA remains almost universal, and there are concerns that such exposure may affect health, especially in childhood.
BPA is a chemical building block used to make polycarbonate plastic as well as some epoxies. Produced at the rate of about 7 million tons per year worldwide, it can leach from polycarbonate bottles into the liquids they contain, and from epoxies that line cans of soup and other food items. A 2011 study published found that eating soup from cans lined with BPA-containing epoxy caused study participants’ BPA levels to rise by a factor of almost 20.
“Our findings suggest that additional studies are needed to examine this BPA-asthma link, given the high burden of pediatric asthma and widespread exposure to BPA in the United States,” says lead author Lesliam Quirós-Alcalá, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Bloomberg School. “This is especially important given that Black Americans have higher asthma rates than whites and also, according to CDC data, have higher exposure to these chemicals than whites.”
