Depression and suicide linked to air pollution in new global study
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This is kind of my hobby horse: you don't need to subject people to harm to test causuality. You can do the opposite: Remove harm and see what happens. Maybe give people free HVAC upgrades to filter more particles.
Of course this would be irresponsible so I'm hoping that by combining data from multiple studies and getting a better grip on how to control the test environment to selectively adjust (remove) only the studied parameters (pollutants) we can still get a good idea of what's happening.
On the one hand, the machine is specifically administering the pollutant to humans; on the other, without the device they'd be getting the exact same and worse.. I'd say yes if offered that for my house and it could help research.
But using a filter that selectively removes just that pollutant and changes nothing[0] else would probably be the cleanest way to do it.
[0] another thing that's very hard to achieve.
Seems kind of like saying (although this example is certainly less ethical to those of us who oppose murder and death penalties) that there's a difference ethically between killing someone by putting poison into their body vs. killing them by preventing food/water to go into their body.
But as to achieving it, sure I wasn't proposing it as necessarily a good or feasible option - other the little bit of research I did when choosing which air purifier for my bedroom I don't know much about the technology.
I was more just thinking about the ethical question if it were possible, since I can appreciate the argument against it but like I said, I personally would be completely happy for a research team to offer me the hypothetical machine.
I guess it's the difference between a surgeon operating and taking out 90% of a tumor, and a surgeon taking out the whole tumor then putting a bit back in. But again, I am not an ethics expert, this is just me bouncing ideas.
By definition, it is a concentration of things small and solid. Whether they are ground tires, engine soot, rock/dirt, pollen, mold spores or powdered cyanides, they are counted the same.
If you wish to replicate pollutants, then consider ethical implications of: Looks the same to me, my colleagues and everyone I know, yet it's not, or is it?
People don't wait to determine whether school district performance is caused by the staff or the selection effect of eager parents, they just move to good school districts.
Chase those good effects AND attempt to understand them. Understanding the mechanism is not necessary to select for good results.
(All ethics is utilitarian in effect. Kantians stop pretending.)
So perhaps the asthma numbers are influenced by an increased willingness to diagnose it. Just a thought.
https://www.cdc.gov/asthma/asthma_stats/asthma_underlying_de...
Do you have any intuition for how to identify an increased willingness to over-diagnose? It may be true, but how do we test this hypothesis?
It will be interesting to see the driving environmental causalities behind these autoimmune disease increases if pollution is not a key variable.
Plus unfiltered air is elsewhere, as a confounder.
Or just reduce pollution in the first place! AFAIK, manufacturing and running HVAC would add more pollution and cost more than switching (for instance) from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles. Or even better, cycling within cities. etc.
1. Does adding an air filter in peoples home improve health outcomes? 2. Does pumping a suspected noxious element into a room in lab harm some small group of people in some limited testable way?
Question 1 is better than 2. Why? Because there are more people like those in question 1. Answers to question 1 inform my future choices, answers to question 2 do not. I prefer answers that improve health to those that harm health.
Always prefer observational studies done in the field (in situ). Demanding experimental studies done in a lab will give you less bang for your buck. Let's all do our part to drive down health care costs, please.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4119479/
I wish I had as many advocates as the devil did.
I'm not suggesting that the things in a room cause depression. Correlation tells you more than strict causation ever could.
An example: Income is higher among vim users than eclipse users. Does that suggest anything to you?
It does to me, but that's because I'm willing to let the evidence shape my decisions. If I waited for strictly-causal proof then I'm leaving money on the table.
Another tip: When will it stop being the case that vim users make more money than eclipse users? When evidence mounts and marginally push the lazy-about-evidence-people toward vim. By the time the last eclipse user switches away there won't be any more money on the table to take. Also eclipse will be dead by then.
Be greedy with evidence and lazy with your attachments, not the reverse.
https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.1408795
Personally, I'm down with harm reduction even if it doesn't teach us anything. As a goal it seems pretty good on its own.
HVAC and indoor air quality (IAQ) is a fascinating topic and it takes good design to get it right. In most HVAC systems you can't just stick a higher MERV filter in and expect good results because they are designed for specific amounts of air flow. Thicker filters cause more air resistance which reduces air flow and fan efficiency which means less comfort and greater energy use.
Often a better strategy in a retrofit is to increase air sealing (a good energy recommendation anyway) and install an E/HRV to exchange indoor for outdoor air with a good filter in it. PM2.5 comes from outside so this should take care of it.
https://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/unintended-consequences-...
https://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/7-reasons-your-filter-is...
I would recommend it to all in North India who can afford it, esp households with small children.
How do you know?
1. Does my air purifier filter out PM2.5?
or
2. Dos lower PM2.5 make me sleep better?
For #1 there is no placebo effect (there is no human element!)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180822112406.h... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26022815/ https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.201010-157... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3165134/ https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.200704-632... https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1476-06...
I do have evidence that eating mud is likely to hurt my stomach: the relevant body of literature showing that this is a likely event for the population I'm part of.
In OP's case, however, considering that the relevant body of litetuare shows that placebos are very effective for improving sleep quality, I would say it's very reasonable to ask someone to elaborate on why they are so convinced that their method of treatment is not a placebo for sleep quality.
No one is saying they have to "prove" it--they can just elaborate on their conviction: perhaps OP had many insomnnia treatments before and this was the only one that showed efficiency. Not a proof, but it is some circumstatial evidence. On the other hand, maybe OP is not aware how effective placebos are, in which case his statement may be too strong to straight-out declare that "it's not a placebo effect."
Please link some examples, because I somehow doubt that you referenced them before forming an opinion. I think we all know eating lots of mud is a bad idea without referencing literature, let alone qualifiers about population groups.
I'm curious if you've lived in any of these hyper-polluted cities. The health effects of breathing such smog is absolutely palpable.
Here's a couple of studies on how PM2.5 affects your arteries, blood pressure, stress hormones, etc. I don't doubt all of these effects can add up to a better or worse night's sleep.
- "clear cardiopulmonary benefits of indoor air purification among young, healthy adults", after only 48 hrs of intervention: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26022815/
- "significantly higher blood pressure, hormones, insulin resistance, and biomarkers of oxidative stress and inflammation among individuals exposed to higher PMs": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28808144/
That's because I assumed it was meant to be a hypothetical example--I don't actually have an opinion on the health effects of eating mud.
The point is that one claim is regarding the likelihood of X happening due to Y (in general), and the other claim is about the affirmation that X happened because of Y (in a specific case.) Likelihood is confirmed by scientific articles that employ statistical inference methods such as the ones you have been posting, while the other claim is undemonstrable by the scientific method, so it is commonly supported through further circumstantial/anecdotal evidence, which is what I assumed the other poster asked for.
Anyway, given that most of your comment is posting more scientific articles, we're probably arguing about different things.
Then, stop. Observe your lung function and comfort levels throughout the next 3 months.
I am rather certain that you will feel a difference. :)
A real HVAC with air filtering will circulate air from the outside, so is quite different.
It’s like refusing to wear a mask next to the california wildfires saying it’d be a cleaner solution to just put out the flames.
Silver bullets, just like with code, do not exist for real life problems.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24121465
> A meta-analysis of pooled odds ratios showed a significant relationship between debt and mental disorder (OR=3.24), depression (OR=2.77), suicide completion (OR=7.9), suicide completion or attempt (OR=5.76), problem drinking (OR=2.68), drug dependence (OR=8.57), neurotic disorder (OR=3.21) and psychotic disorders (OR=4.03).
When are we going to start designing our economies around creating a healthy and enjoyable environment for humans to actually live in, and not arranging human lives around squeezing the greatest amount of economic efficiency out of them as possible? The way we make ourselves live is tantamount to animal abuse.
I do, however, think the overall approach we are taking towards depression as a society is fundamentally backwards. We have a massive industry that is focused around producing psychiatric medication so that people can more effectively operate in the society we've structured around them, but we didn't even stop to consider the idea that maybe it is the systems we've built around them that are pathological in themselves.
We have this basic notion that if someone doesn't fit in with this social mold we've built that it must be a fault in them, it must be a sickness they suffer from that prevents them from thriving in the ways we expect them to. But why are we not asking ourselves whether the square hole that we are trying to shove their round peg into isn't the problem in itself? Why do we think we are helpless to change things on a systemic level? We grate against the idea that the world we've built might be a bad fit for us, and not the other way around.
Instead, we have pathologized what is an entirely natural reaction to the world people live in. We think we need medication to make humans fit better into this system, but really it is the system that is failing us. We built this world for us to live in, why did we make it so incredibly hostile to human happiness?
The problem of air pollution and the problem of the fucked up society we live in are not identical in scope. You can't dismiss the solution to the smaller problem for not solving the larger one.
If living in a smog filled city is affecting my health, I will invest in air filters and masks before I invest in societal change that will change the way the world does business. I can do one in an afternoon, and the other is an unbounded task.
We should be able to tackle problems at large and in the small simultaneously, but your position strikes me as all or nothing in the sense that nothing but your exact prescription will do.
Given A: fucked up society, B: air pollution, C: depression, the world is probably a cyclical graph between all three. You are denying that B and C could be connected, just because you think A is such a huge problem. This is putting the blinders on against evidence for political reasons.
My grandma lived in what essentially was a pre-industrial society. She lived in crushing poverty (i.e. being hungry most of the time). Then, our country industrialized and she was never hungry again.
That doesn't mean, however, that the way we live doesn't desperately need to be improved upon. We may have lost hunger but we gained depression. Maybe we should be lucky to die of suicide rather than to starve, but I think we can and should try to build a world where we don't have to do either.
EDIT: I also want to add that debt is an entirely different but very real and horrible kind of crushing poverty. People in debt have their basic needs met, but they are slaves to a number they carry over their heads, often for the rest of their lives. I can't honestly say that is always a better life than to be free to do what you want even if you must constantly contend with hunger.
Joking aside, I tend to agree
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/hidden-costs-of-co...
> In the US alone, individuals who struggle to pay off their debts and loans are more than twice as likely to experience mental health problems, including depression and anxiety. Today’s unprecedented levels of consumer debt prompt further exploration of its effect on mental and physical well-being.
> While suicide is not a common response to unmanageable debt, it remains a leading cause of death in the US. The potential of suicide increases among financially distressed individuals as debt levels become harder to manage. Suicide rates have increased by more than 30 percent since 1999 according to a recent report by the Center for Disease Control. Like Jerome, more than half of people who die by suicide do not have a history of depression or mental illness. Almost 30 percent of suicides occur in response to a crisis within the past two weeks and 16 percent occur in response to a financial problem.
>The fact remained that at the beginning of the nineteenth century an estimated three-quarters of all people alive were trapped in bondage against their will either in some form of slavery or serfdom. [1]
The common historical interpretion today is that the industrial revolution _improved_ the standards of living for the average person, so it's contradictory to your thesis.
[1] Forsythe, David P. Encyclopedia of human rights. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press, 2009. (399)
Anyway, this study shows that medium development countries have significantly lower suicide rates than high and very high development countries, which could lend support to my position:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221060061...
> There has been no worldwide ecological study on suicide as a global major public health problem. This study aimed to identify the variations in suicide specific rates using the Human Development Index (HDI) and some health related variables among countries around the world. In this ecological study, we obtained the data from the World Bank Report 2013. The analysis was restricted to 91 countries for which both the epidemiologic data from the suicide rates and HDI were available. Overall, the global prevalence of suicide rate was 10.5 (95% confidence intervals: 8.8, 12.2) per 100,000 individuals, which significantly varied according to gender (16.3 in males vs. 4.6 in females, p < 0.001) and different levels of human development (11.64/100,000 individuals in very high development countries, 7.93/100,000 individuals in medium development countries, and 13.94/100,000 individuals in high development countries, p = 0.004). In conclusion, the suicide rate varies greatly between countries with different development levels. Our findings also suggest that male gender and HDI components are associated with an increased risk of suicide behaviors. Hence, detecting population subgroups with a high suicide risk and reducing the inequality of socioeconomic determinants are necessary to prevent this disorder around the world.
That basically follows from the definition of HDI: one of the three components of HDI is life expectancy, so even if people in countries of different HDI would have equal tendencies to commit suicide, a lower proportion of people would actually end up committing suicide in lower HDI countries as they would likely die due to other causes either at birth or later.
Hypothetical Theories are nice, but not when actual evidence contradicts them. Do you have any actual evidence for your comment?
> Job strain and long work hours were longitudinally associated with moderate/severe suicidal ideation. Increasing job control and ensuring optimal level of work demands, including 40 h or less of work per week may be an important strategy for the prevention of suicide in working populations.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00420-018-1330-7
Here's a study showing that suicide risk varies with workplace, workplace environment, and financial strain: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-suicide-occupation...
Also: http://electronicswatch.org/the-link-between-employment-cond...
>actual evidence contradicts them
Where exactly?
There is more than one variable in play. We can optimize wealth AND health.
(An aside: Your argument is a form of learned helplessness. I expect more from you. I am certain that in matters of business and your families well-being you are not so reductionist.)
What kinds of solutions would you like to see?
"Our teeth spent millions of years evolving in nature, makes sense that scrubbing them with unnatural mint-flavored pastes and plastic bristles would make them go haywire"
"Our eyes spent millions of years evolving in nature, makes sense that covering them with unnatural lenses would make them go haywire"
etc.
Cause and effect isn't necessary to reduce harm. You with me? It's nice to have certainly, but it is not required.
Imagine that I am a friend of yours. I tell you that my child is depressed and the doctor suggests pill1, it makes my child more lethargic. We try pill2 and the depression is gone.
I tell you that I am happy with the results of pill2 and that while I am interested in how it works and potential long-term consequences, I'm happy staying on pill2.
Is this imagined parent strictly better than a parent that refuses to try any pill until convinced of its mechanism and success? I would say yes.
Observation is the workhorse of the scientific paradigm, not idealized experimentation. The quantity, and thus value, of Inductive evidence is greater than that of Deductive evidence.
Which would you value in your medical care professional?
Measure what you value and optimize for it. Why do this devils advocate stuff?
As if there aren't uncountable other variables that have changed dramatically over millions of years. Or hell, do you even know if suicide rates are higher today than they were millions of years ago? No. You came here to try to suggest city living was inferior to rural living, and used "millions of years of evolution", and some implication that modern rural life is somehow more similar to those millions of years than urban life.
Then what does this suggest? Why does "unnatural light" (ignoring that humans have built "unnatural light" fires for ~1.7 million years) make a brain go haywire, but not, say, clipping one's toenails? Or reading books, or sitting on chairs, or being blasted by radio waves, or running on treadmills, or traveling over 15mph, or wearing clothes, or flying in airplanes, etc. What are you saying?
Health effects of radio waves: https://www.fcc.gov/engineering-technology/electromagnetic-c...
Artificial light exposure and circadian rhythm: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30311830
I'm saying exactly what I said - there are some aspects of an urban technological life that are harmful to the human body
Edit: I guess I'm being pedantic at this point. My personal position is industrial agriculture is failing rapidly and that the modern world will reconcile with the fact that either we will all starve, or learn how to farm again. I spend half the year working on an organic farm, and my life is immeasurably better than when I'm in the city (which is of course, only my personal subjective datum which and I realize how much HN hates anecdote as evidence)
The same could be said for : 'Working night shifts long term is linked to depression and suicide'
Now, while you can reduce global warming and air polution, its different to try and say we need to all work only during the day.
https://www.cdc.gov/ruralhealth/Suicide.html
Why imagine what is true when you can take a second and find out what is true? The truth is external to you, look for it. I don't want to be a jerk, but you have generated a hypothesis(great), why not test it against the facts available to you? Maybe you owe it to yourself.
According to this, it is also true of Germany:
https://ij-healthgeographics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1...
Let me know if you have better data. (I am aware that Indian Reservation tilt the scales big time toward rural areas, but do not think that removing them as outliers changes the balance)
I wish it took only a second to find out what is true, but data is complicated and has lots of confounding variables, and it's too easy to not account for them and get totally untrue information out of the data.
The algorithm to pursue truth:
1. Find out how you personally differ from happy and healthy people.
2. Reduce those differences however you can.
3. Watch yourself become happier and healthier.
4. That's the whole thing.
Don't demand that information conform to your assumption before you can take action. Take action and document your assumptions and challenge them along your journey to improvement.
A neural network does not make demands of its data set. It changes itself to better match the limited truth that it does see.
Uncertainty and doubt are your enemies. Challenge them with data don't reduce yourself to paralysis. Look up "Epistemic learned helplessness".
An example: Will flossing improve my health? Be the kind of person that wants to improve their health and tries to improve their health. Try flossing as matter of character, not based on whether it does independent of the social class of other flossers. If successful people think that other successful people floss, then they will too. There is no isolation among the variables. Don't demand that of reality.
* the air is terrible already and the government is going to build more coal plants, powered by the 'cleanest coal' approved by the POTUS, sigh. Instead of one nuclear power plant now we have four coal plants instead, great.
https://www.co-operative.coop/campaigning/loneliness
"The report briefly mentions the ‘rurality factor’ as presenting greater barriers to connection, with rural areas having fewer and more expensive support services such as transport links. However, it goes on to suggest that ‘rural communities were felt to be less closed off than their urban counterparts’, with rural participants more likely to ask how people are, or stop for chats."
If not this is like observing that there are a lot of loud bangs in warzones and concluding loud noises kill people, even though they are at best just a side effect of the actual causes.
> The particle pollution analysed in the study is produced by burning fossil fuels in vehicles, homes and industry.
Last night around the dinner table we were discussing an article from The Week about video game addiction. It described young men a lot like my great-great grandfather, with just the moment in history changed. It seems fairly straightforward that the root causes are:
-- Limited economic opportunities / safety net. -- Lack (for whatever reason) of social ties and support. A lack of an outlet for emotional intimacy.
Are chemicals, including in our air, at play? Sure, possibly. But, it seems clear that in any case you hear about a suicide the story is basically the same - someone simply did not see a future for themselves. We have not come fully to grips with a post-industrial / post-agrarian economy here in the US, leaving many men in particular without much purpose.
The rural / urban divide is mentioned in this thread - living here in rural America (hi y'all!) is a microcosm of the rest of the country - we have the same problems as cities, just on a different but compressed scale. You see both the happiest and most miserable people up close. If you have the financial means to live away from the city, then you can be the big fish in the small pond, IE: both the financial and social I mentioned above. On the other hand, if you are living paycheck to paycheck, surrounded by a limited social network, etc, is it really that surprising it leads to depression? That's the same regardless of your physical location.
"DISCUSSION: Our findings support the hypothesis of an association between long-term PM2:5 exposure and depression, as well as supporting hypotheses of possible associations between long-term PM2:5 exposure and anxiety and between short-term PM10 exposure and suicide. The limited literature and methodological challenges in this field, including heterogeneous outcome definitions, exposure assessment, and residual confounding, suggest further high-quality studies are warranted to investigate potentially causal associations between air pollution and poor mental health."
Don't really get the point, not really sure the journal is P hacking with PM10 being suicide and PM2.5 being depression but PM2.5/10 gives you cancer's which is depressing, why wouldn't you clean your air?
The suicide aspect I’m not sure of, but many people I knew had the option of leaving and did.
we're looking for folks interested in: * data engineering * firmware and IoT platforms * full-stack and internal tooling * data scientists and other kinds of scientists interested in data, air quality, and atmospheric/environmental modeling
If your air or water quality suck, take it to city hall
Also worth noting that the city can only do so much. A factory 3 counties over could spew noticeable smog, and you don't have any recourse outside of moving.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/12/toward-a-predictive-th...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/13/what-is-depression-any...
The first tries to fit it into a predictive processing framework, the second rounds up a variety of findings, including correlation with inflammation and treatment with ketamine.
Particle pollution — also called particulate matter (PM) — is made up of particles (tiny pieces) of solids or liquids that are in the air. These particles may include:
Dust
Dirt
Soot
Smoke
Drops of liquid
https://www.cdc.gov/air/particulate_matter.html
What Are People Dying of on High Air Pollution Days? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...
"The air pollution disasters in London in 1952, the Meuse valley in 1930, and in Donoroa, Pennsylvania, in 1948 made it clear that extremely high levels of particulate-based smog could produce large increases in the daily mortality rate."
If anything we are not "killing the planet" we are destroying the conditions that allow life to thrive on Earth. I've been following these links since 2013 and more studies are showing this could be a "thing."
"Here we estimate associations between multiple environmental factors (air quality, residential greenness, mean temperature, and temperature variability) and self-assessed mental health scores for over 20,000 Chinese residents. Mental health scores were surveyed in 2010 and 2014, allowing us to link changes in mental health to the changes in environmental variables. Increases in air pollution and temperature variability are associated with higher probabilities of declined mental health. Mental health is statistically unrelated to mean temperature in this study, and the effect of greenness on mental health depends on model settings, suggesting a need for further study. Our findings suggest that the environmental policies to reduce emissions of air pollution or greenhouse gases can improve mental health of the public in China."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10196-y
More importantly:
1. Air Pollution Linked to Mutations https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2002/12/air-pollution-linked...
2. Air pollution causes sperm mutations https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080113/full/news.2008.439.h...
3. January 1994 What Are People Dying of on High Air Pollution Days? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...
"The air pollution disasters in London in 1952, the Meuse valley in 1930, and in Donoroa, Pennsylvania, in 1948 made it clear that extremely high levels of particulate-based smog could produce large increases in the daily mortality rate."
Edit: A Few more from earlier times:
1996 Feb: Psychiatric aspects of air pollution. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8637739
December 1984: Air pollution and depressive symptomatology: Exploratory analyses of intervening psychosocial factors https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01256411
Nov. 2, 1999 Air Pollution Linked to Increased Heart Rate https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/19991102/air-pollution-linke...
1981 Dec The psychological effects of indoor air pollution. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805416/
June 1989 Psychological effects of air pollution on healthy residents—A time-series approach https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02724...
But the Guardian made clear it's bias when it advertised for funding with a giant banner claiming "Trump must be impeached.". This isn't objective, fact based journalism, it's propagandist advocacy journalism.
A random walk may not get you out a bad situation, but staying put is strictly worse less likely to get you out.
What would a reinforcement learning agent do?
>some of the depression might just be nutrient deficiency.
>Can be tested by fasting for 4 days
Air pollution linked to overpopulation. Overpopulation linked to high birth rates. High birth rates linked to sex. So in conclusion: Celibacy cures depression and suicide.
Of course, why stop there? We could keep going deeper.
If A causes B and B causes C then we can only say that A and C are correlated. If the average chain of causality is 4 long then the Bs outnumber the As and Cs.
Inductive (observation) evidence is more available than deductive (purely logical) evidence. Why limit yourself to only deductive evidence?
I don't have to resort to a chemistry lesson to convince you that drinking bleach would be very harmful, right? Can't I merely show you photos of bleach-bellied-corpses?
That said, it has other value in signally regions of high air pollution are regions of higher proportional depression.
Areas of high pollution are less desirable to live in. If you live right next to a highway, garbage dump or power plant, your property value is going to be lower. (I must admit, I’m taking a US-centric perspective here)
With that in mind, you could just as easily conclude that living in poorer regions causes depression.
Anyone who thinks curing depression is as simple as cleaning up the air is oversimplifying a much more complicated relationship.
For context, particles from PM2.5 can and apparently do enter the brain:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/05/toxic-ai...
In cities like London most of the city is like that. probably same as L.A. or New york, the whole place is next to a highway + powerplant + garbage dump