Ultrafine Particles

Living in a big city is not quite healthy. We can find all kinds of pollutants that could harm our health, add to that the stress, unhealthy foods and unhealthy lifestyle triggers our body to catch all kinds of illnesses. Air pollution is everywhere, its what we are breathing in our everyday busy life, although more developed countries are doing some research inventing machines to resolve this problem, but what about the developing countries, its the most contributors to pollute the air we breath. And mostly we don't have the technologies and high budget to to something about this. I just read an article recently that says, a new studies had found out that road tunnels have a highest concentration of pollutants that is called ultrafine particles. The study was done in Sydney.

A toxic cocktail of ultrafine particles is lurking inside road tunnels in concentration levels so high they have the potential to harm drivers and passengers, a new study has found.

Road tunnels were locations where maximum exposure to dangerous ultrafine particles in addition to other pollutants occurred, this may give more risks to drivers and passengers like me, to think that they are being exposed in this place in everyday basis.

"The human health effects of exposure to ultrafine particles produced by fuel combustion are generally regarded as detrimental," Professor Morawska said.

Effects of ultrafine range from minor respiratory problems in healthy people, to acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) in people with existing heart complaints. So its really alarming, more people living in the cities have higher rate of respiratory diseases. According to Professor Morawska, drivers and occupants of new vehicles which had their windows closed were safer than people travelling in older vehicles. And the people who are driving of motorcycles are the one exposed to this pollutants.

It should be a good challenge for the govertment to do something to remove this dangerous air pollutants.