Facts on Pollutants and Health Effects.
The high rates of industrialization and the race between countries for economic supremacy have led to a significant increase in environmental pollution as a trend, caused by chemical pollutants that are waste products from our homes, factories and other daily life activities. Each pollutant has its own dangerous effects in people’s health, it can be similar due to the shared pathways that they travel in our body or if they belong to the same chemical group, but they will not be the same toxicity levels. The big issue of these chemical compounds is that they are found in the water, the air and the land in a cycle that current technologies cannot afford to purify.
Air pollutants or smoke waste are produced in agriculture, energy production and distribution, coal and gas transmissions, transportation emissions, fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This waste ends up in the air we breathe or in the upper layers of the earth’s atmosphere, a large amount is produced by garbage or landfills of products commonly used by people; thrash that also become an emerging pollutants!. Some diseases attributed to air pollutants are COPD, lung cancer, cardiovascular diseases such as coronary heart disease and strokes; air pollutants affect the respiratory system, can cause infections and aggravate other illnesses (see figure 1).
These harmful molecules includes particulate pollutants comprised by suspended solids and liquid droplets (particulate matter — PM, BaP), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), ozone (O3), ammonium, methanol, CO2, CO, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH), among others. Some compounds could rise higher in the atmosphere, but when it rains, some of the air pollutants fall on the land and water bodies, which ends up to be used in agriculture to grow animals and plants, our food and to spread in a natural environment; we must also consider illegal operations and industrial accidents that may occur.
Another type of pollutants is the emerging contaminants (ECs). This large group of chemical compounds, the emerging contaminants, are of high concern globally because they are widely distributed throughout the environment, generated in various industrial practices and man-made activities. Those compounds include toxic micro-pollutants, pesticides, plastics, pharmaceuticals, hormones, toxins, and industrially-related dyes and similar; whose production is an important source of air pollutants. Its effects on health, mainly attack the nervous and vascular system, they are also carcinogenic and cause endocrine problems (see figure 2); its origin is many productions in agriculture, hospitals and houses.
These pollutants increase day by day in a way that doesn’t seem to diminish, some of them are able to accumulating in nature, animals and our body. Air pollutants are more dangerous because is easier to have contact with them, we cannot hold our breath and ignore it, that is why several million people die every year. It is important to observe the strong interactions with animals, plants and microorganisms; the presence of these strange compounds in the natural habitat will cause changes in populations and their behaviors. So will the world have a chance to change this condition ? We have to reflect on the daily action and the manufacture of products from the root; living a friendly life with nature will reduce the emissions of pollutants, giving us the opportunity to clean the planet, only then we can solve the environmental problems that we have caused.
Images:
(1) Columbia Broadcasting System — CBS
(2) European Environment Agency —EEA
(3) Researchgate. Overview of Emerging Contaminants and Associated Human Health Effects
