Mid-pregnancy pollution exposure linked to postpartum depression
bps.org.uk
bps.org.uk
I don't have access to the full paper, but Im very curious what kind of controls were utilized for this study. Granted, a specific mid pregnancy expsoure causing a 4 fold increase seems significant enough to be able to assign some causation. But some sneaky confounding factors are fun to puzzle on.
Maybe poorer mothers (also correlated with depression) have to work longer hours/multiple jobs (also correlated) in more heavily polluted environments. But that still wouldnt explain the effect only appearing mid pregnancy...
Regardless, I'm interested to see what the health of humanity looks like in the coming decades. Microplastics in the brain, smog in the lungs, heavy metals in the water, screens in front of our eyes all day. Fun times we live in
Probably still better than today, at least in the Western world. We got rid of lead and asbestos (that shit was everywhere), seriously tackled workplace accidents, injuries (including stuff like silicosis) and deaths, and moved a lot of toxic industry off to Asia.
We only claim we did. Meanwhile places like Trenton, Ohio exist and it's not alone. (Although at least all of the publicity Trenton has gotten has finally forced it to start fixing the problem [0]).
[0]: https://www.greatertrenton.org/2022/01/16/trenton-water-work...
> We got rid of ... asbestos
We only claim we did. Have you noticed and wondered why there's so many "sue your boss/government/friend/family if you've been exposed to asbestos" commercials? Anyway, don't just take my word for it [1].
[1]: https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/article/amphibole-asbes...
> We ... seriously tackled workplace accidents, injuries and deaths, and moved a lot of toxic industry off
The current political regime wants to rollback those same workplace protections.
That toxic industry moving off is obviously a bad thing for where it moved to. And while the Trump-initiated tariff war definitely has a lot of other downsides and effects, the one thing it might (in theory) do is bring manufacturing back to the U.S. -- but only in the long term (and only if other negative effects don't cause other problems to stop the trade war). So toxic industries might very well end up back here.
> > Regardless, I'm interested to see what the health of humanity looks like in the coming decades.
I'm not a betting man. But if I were, and given the current state of politics in the U.S. (and healthcare system in particular), I would bet against our health improving in general. USA life expectancy is already declining [2] [3]. COVID didn't help (a lot of older-aged people died earlier than expected which lead to a significant drop). There's more to it than just COVID though. A lot more.
[2] (2022): https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-life-expectancy-in-t...
[3] (2022): https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2022/life-expectancy-is-declini...
[4]: https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-release...
It is great to se people trying to get hard evidence of these thing to argue in favor of it but I can only see dark times ahead and the misogyny will not decrease in the next decade.
In urban places.