|
|
|
|
|
|
by kikokikokiko
1340 days ago
|
|
|
Air pollution, just as "second hand" smoke, is way overblown as a risk factor for lung cancer. Nothing compares, not even close, to sending foreign particles, the end results of combustion, straight to your lungs, like smokers do. The result of years and years of this sludge accumulating on your alveoli is going to be bad, you don't have to be oncologist to see it. And that's why I always tell my pot head friends to beware of what will happen to their lungs 20, 30 years from now. "Muh, it's a natural plant!!!" If you burn it and send the results of the combustion to your lungs on a daily basis, good luck. I don't know about vaping, but in my opinion, if it's not air, pure and simple air, it should not be entering your lungs. Vaping probably is orders of magnitude safer than smoking, but who knows. We never know what we don't know before it happens. |
|
|
https://aqicn.org/city/utah/salt-lake-city/
So… something like 5-10 µg/m³ PM 2.5 for most of the year, with rare spikes up to 30 µg/m³ for short periods of time.
If that's your definition of air pollution, then sure. One cigarette a year will probably do more damage to you than that.
I live in a really polluted place, with yearly PM 2.5 average of ~100 µg/m³ (daily mean of hundreds of micrograms per m³ in winter, and short spikes up to 1500 µg/m³ for hours at a time), and high levels of toxic gases (SO₂, NO₂, H₂S, HCl, HF, and a few others).
Literally everyone here suffers from chronic bronchitis, including myself. (Never smoked.) Deaths from lung cancer and COPD among non-smokers are commonplace. I don't have the exact statistics (the government doesn't publish absolute numbers), but incidence of lung cancer is claimed to be around 3× the national average (which is already bad compared to developed countries).
I believe it's also pretty bad in industrial Chinese cities, although they have so much smoking population it's difficult to differentiate.