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Comment by clumsysmurf | Hacker News Reader

Its probably worse that it looks

"Researchers from Queen Mary University of London have found that people exposed to air pollution levels well within UK guidelines have changes in the structure of the heart, similar to those seen in the early stages of heart failure."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180803103315.h...

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That's interesting.

We're looking at moving our son to a new school that's right at the corner of two major artery roads in Melbourne, with some 17 000 vehicles passing daily (just on one of them) according to VicRoads. The building doesn't appear to have a HVAC/filtration system. Playground is behind the building, but still has significant back traffic and is inside of 100-300 metres from the main roads.

I'm saying that the fumes from the cars and trucks could likely have long term health impact, but struggling to convince wife of this - she says if it was that dangerous, then why wouldn't someone have done something about it? I must clearly be paranoid.. ?

Personally, even though the small school appears otherwise excellent, I'm loath to expose him to these fumes.

I seem to have acquired an ability to taste them whilst on my bicycle commute, and will don a Respro mask when riding the streets with the most backed up traffic.

You have a legitimate concern, I've seen a few studies over the years measure VOCs as a function of distance from busy roads. Here is a very recent one:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150421105344.h...

https://futurism.com/an-app-can-identify-highly-polluted-are...

Thanks, greatly appreciate that. This helps fuel (no pun intended) my belief that Australia is just ignorant of such things, and that this - in addition to the fact that it's very uncomfortable data - may be why we don't "hear about it" so as to speak.

You should be concerned as many research shows:

* leaving close to a busy road raises the risk of early dementia [1]

* higher risk of asthma

* cardiac arythmia

I could go longer but don't want to get too dark

For your situation, I think a laser egg from kaiterra is a good machine, you can bring it around and is reliable on the long run. They use a plantower sensor (mentioned in another comment) but have their own firmware on to interpret the readings. I know the founder of kaiterra personnaly so I might be biased but I'm not the only one in the industry recommending it for home use. The laser egg 2 is also measuring TVOC but is a bit more expensive, you might want to look into that. Overall a good and reliable machine for this price.

You would also like to consider PM10 in Australia, from memory, the dryness of the country and heavy farming in certain areas was producing a lot of bigger particles.

You can also track public data on sites like aqicn.org [2] or openAQ [3] (though the data looks sparse for Australia there).

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[2] http://aqicn.org/map/#@g/-37.8328/144.8348/11z

[3] https://openaq.org/#/map?_k=ej77x9

Great response, thanks very much. That's interesting how it's also been linked to cardiac arrhythmia! I'm unable to order a Laser Egg from (no Australian distributors), so would need to source an alternative - unless I go for a freight forwarder.

You could simply contact them, they're a bunch of good people, I'm sure they could make it work for you!

Funny to see this 16-bit-plus-one range in the Laser Egg specs:

> PARTICLE COUNT

> 0-65536 particles / 0.1L

>In the study, average annual exposures to PM2.5 were well within UK guidelines (25µg per cubic metre), although they were approaching or past World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines (10µg per cubic metre).

What AQI do these numbers translate to?

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