Comment by ChrisLomont | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisLomont | Hacker News Reader

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"They reported that insoluble lead compounds were associated with respiratory tract inflammation, which could lead to respiratory tract cancer"

" lead and chromium compounds in road dust were present in human body fluids, indicating that exposure to road dust carries certain risks. Lead is known to be responsible for deficits in neurobehavioral and cognitive development in childhood"

"Franklin et al. established an association between PM2.5 and cardiovascular mortality."

"Bell et al. [25] found that elements of PM2.5 road dust particles such as aluminum and silicon were associated with low birth weight (LBW)"

"Long-term exposure to aluminum was found to be associated with Alzheimer disease . Aluminum was found to be associated with respiratory allergies such as asthma in aluminum industry workers. The accumulation of aluminum can cause cardiac hypertrophy leading to cardiac failure."

"the health risks of road dust and found that a higher risk was associated with the presence of lead, chromium, ... Chromium is known to be carcinogenic. In human subjects, chromium has been found to cause allergic reactions and respiratory distress after short-term exposure. Long-term exposure to chromium has been proven to be associated with lung cancer. "

Increased incidence of: cancer, cognitive development deficits, increased cardiovascular mortality, low birth weight, Alzheimer's, caridac failure, lung cancer - these are not long term enough for you? These are not adverse health effects?

There are so many more statements like this that I don't even care to list them all. Yet you claim others didn't read the article, then summarize it as having no "long-term" health risks.

What in the paper supports your claim of no long term adverse health effects, compare to the (partial) list of items I quoted? Have a quote?

If your claim is that the article reports that there is a link between road dust and long-term adverse health effects where is that stated? If that is the conclusion of the review, then that should be clearly and unequivocally stated in the, well, conclusion (or abstract). Loose quotes that may point in that direction is not sufficient. E.g:

> "They reported that insoluble lead compounds were associated with respiratory tract inflammation, which could lead to respiratory tract cancer"

This is speculation and not evidence. It is certainly possible that road dust containing lead increases the prevalence of respiratory tract cancer, but this is not evidence of it.

> What in the paper supports your claim of no long term adverse health effects, compare to the (partial) list of items I quoted? Have a quote?

Read the "Discussion" and "Possible future research" sections. I didn't claim that there was no link between road dust and long-term adverse health effects, only that the review did not identify such a link.

Did you read the article title? "A literature review"

It was not proving anything - it was listing things in the literature, of which it listed a significant amount of studies that did conclude significant adverse long term effects.

No where did it claim those studies were invalid - and it went to great lengths to list all the problems I listed above and more.

A literature review doesn't get to the end and say "Eureka! We proved it!" It gets to the end and says "we have listed current research, and we recommend further stuff for the following reasons".

It's a literature review - not a meta study, not a new study, not a critique of the previous papers - so it's not the proof you want it to be. The evidence of the paper is in the papers it cited, with key points pulled into this one.

>Read the "Discussion" and "Possible future research" sections.

Yes, it starts with the phrase "Our literature review...." As does the conclusion section, which continued "This literature review found studies that reported the components of road dust particles to be associated with multiple health effects, in particular on the respiratory and cardiovascular system."

I guess we're done at this point. The conclusion clearly states it's a review, and that road dust particles are associated with multiple health effects (which effects? The ones I quoted above, quite serious), which you claim the article does not state.

> It was not proving anything - it was listing things in the literature, of which it listed a significant amount of studies that did conclude significant adverse long term effects.

Which of those studies did conclude "significant adverse long term effects"?

> A literature review doesn't get to the end and say "Eureka! We proved it!" It gets to the end and says "we have listed current research, and we recommend further stuff for the following reasons".

A literature review summarizes the scientific knowledge - it is not merely an index. And as I wrote in my first comment, this summary does not include a link between road dust and long-term adverse health effects.

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