Anyone who lives in Bangkok, but also in Chiang Mai in certain months, has to deal with it: highly polluted air with particulate matter. This is especially a problem for children. Every day, 93 percent of all children under the age of fifteen in the world breathe air that is so polluted that it seriously endangers their health and development. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports this in a new report.
In the report, the WHO examined the effect of air pollution on the health of children worldwide. It shows that around 1,8 billion children breathe heavily polluted air every day. The consequences can be deadly. In 2016, it is estimated that nearly 600.000 children under the age of XNUMX died from acute respiratory infections caused by polluted air. The vast majority of them are under five years old.
Children are vulnerable
One of the reasons why young children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of air pollution is that they breathe faster than adults, and thus ingest more pollutants, the report shows. Children are also smaller and live closer to the ground. Some substances are most concentrated here. The substances are also extra harmful because their brains and bodies are still developing.
According to the WHO, children exposed to severe forms of air pollution are at greater risk of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease later in life. Air pollution can also cause asthma and childhood cancer.
Real-time insight
Do you want to know how the air quality is in your area? View this interactive map of Thailand with various measuring stations: aqicn.org/map/thailand/
World Conference on Air Pollution and Health
Today marks the start of the first World Conference on Air Pollution and Health, which the WHO is holding this week in Geneva. The organization hereby calls on all countries to take action. Countries come together to make new agreements about the global approach to air pollution.
Source: NOS.nl
There is no other way if you are behind a Bus or Car you are immediately black and many mopeds are never checked and no one takes them off the road.
Should start taking everyone off the road without valid papers because they have never heard of an annual turn and no one but no one is doing anything about this.
That would already make a big difference with cleaner air .
So let them do something about the incineration of the waste immediately in the isaan.
Or it smelled what they make in the cow shed against the mosquitoes every night.
Since the Stone Age, we have been accustomed to dumping the waste products of energy generation with fossil resources into the environment. However, when the Geiger counter goes from 3 to 5 ticks, the whole anti-atomic mafia, with Greenpeace at the forefront, goes berserk.
How many people die each year from damaged lungs due to air pollution and how many from radiation diseases? Not to mention the climate effect.
Although forbidden, fields are still burned down at the same time every year, without any real action being taken against this.
Many people in rural areas have little or no knowledge of the harmful effects on health, let alone read or heard anything at all about the diesel problem that was caused by Volkswagen, among others.
In almost every village you see people burning their waste at any time of the day, without taking into account the fellow human beings who have to breathe the air in this immediate area.
When the air quality in Bangkok was so bad for days last year that it became extremely worrying, people were appealed to not to use plastic parts on a sarg during a cremation, without the actual perpetrator being named.
The real culprit, including the many old diesels, which are almost or not under control, remained unaffected and were allowed to spoil the air indefinitely and drive on.
Yes, even in Europe where they are already a lot further along with so-called driving bans, the politicians, unlike in the much stricter America, still adjust air pollution standards in a friendly way so that on the one hand they do not lose their voters, and on the other hand because they prefer to avoid conflicts with the powerful car industry.
What about making charcoal, it also releases quite a bit of carbon monoxide, all my neighbors do it.
And because the waste is not collected here, they also burn it, including the plastic.
Fortunately, carbon monoxide is fairly harmless because it usually leaves the body without causing any damage. But with prolonged exposure it can of course be fatal. Incidentally, it only arises when there is a lack of oxygen and because in Thailand the charcoal fires are almost always lit outside, the chance of this is not so great.
Waste incineration is much worse, but what is the alternative if waste is not collected? There are usually no landfills available. Perhaps (illegal) dumping is better for the environment than incineration. Some types of plastic break down even faster than paper and usually only water and harmless CO2 are released. The micro-organisms must first adapt to the new supply of digestible material.
Plastics made from petroleum will ALWAYS remain plastics without any nutritional value.
Due in particular to UV radiation, the plasticizers evaporate and the plastic does not disintegrate into water and CO2, but into microscopic plastic fibres.
Those microfibers end up everywhere on earth and also in the food chain. In any case, microplastics have already been found in bottled water, beer, honey and salt. And many animals have already died because the stomach was full of larger pieces of plastic.
In the absence of proper processing and reuse of plastics, I am still in favor of incineration, but I also know that this also releases toxic fumes.
I think the (illegal) dumping of plastic waste is a very bad idea, because it makes the problem of plastic pollution even bigger.
Several attempts have already been made to create plastic-eating microorganisms. So far without the desired result.