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| | | CONNECT - Every Breath You Take
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Go to the Listen Again page | | | | | What effect does air pollution have on our health? | | | |
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Every single day we take around 20,000 breaths. For most of us, this happens automatically and we don't give it a second thought. But what exactly, are we exposing ourselves to with every breath? And what its is the link between the air we inhale and respiratory disease?
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In this programme Quentin Cooper investigates the air that we breathe - from the atmosphere to the lung - how that air gets polluted and what effect this has on our health.
Air pollution is nothing new. Indeed there were various statutes introduced as far back as the 15th Century curtailing the burning of coal in London. As the eras change the emphasis moves to different pollutants. The 1950’s it was smog, in the 1980’s it was acid rain. Today the focus is now very much on pollution caused by traffic emissions.
Quentin looks at how politics and the science go hand-in-hand to find ways of improving our air quality - from the global to the national, and from the local to the individual. In travelling from location to location, he looks at the potential pollution which he is exposing himself to - both indoors and outdoors.
With Local Government struggling in over 100 ‘hot-spots’ to achieve Government targets of air quality by 2005, Quentin visits Sheffield to see what initiative are being taken there to monitor, measure and model their own air-pollution problems. Ogo Ossamar, Sheffield Air Quality Officer, demonstrates their computer modelling system, AIRVIRO, which allows them to predict air pollution levels at individual addresses should the council decide to build a development here or a bus lane there.
We hear from Professor Malcolm Green, head of the National Lung Institute about the link between air pollution and health. He says that although its hard to pin down exactly the mechanism, it is clear that air pollution has a negative effect on people who suffer from asthma and can possibly tip non-sufferers into becoming sufferers.
And Quentin looks at why although our air is much better quality than fifty years ago, cases of Asthma have risen dramatically in the same time. Eight million people in the UK have been diagnosed.
Quentin talks to Jill McGowan, former NHS nurse, who has just conducted the biggest study into an ‘alternative’ treatment for Asthma sufferers, called The Buteyko Method - developed in the 1950’s by a Russian professor – that teaches sufferers how to take small shallow breathes through their nose, rather than the ‘in through the nose, out through the mouth’ we’ve all been taught. Early non-peer-reviewed results from Jill’s study suggest dramatic (over 90%) reductions in drug use. | | |
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