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I’m in a laboratory staring at my blood under a microscope. Rather than pristine red blood cells, some of them have been tainted with black markings. I’m now one of the first people in the world to see air pollution building up inside their body.
Less than an hour ago I was standing next to four lanes of busy central London traffic. It was the type of road where you can taste the air and you’re left with a gritty sensation in your mouth. I had volunteered to stand there for 10 minutes; breathing in dirty air as part of an experiment to understand how air pollution is affecting our bodies and damaging our health.
In the UK, poor air quality is thought to kill 30,000 people a year, as well as harming babies in the womb and exacerbating conditions from asthma to dementia. Most of the air pollution I was breathing in came from traffic – billowing invisibly out of exhaust pipes, but also released by the wear and tear of tyres and brakes.
Professor Jonathan Grigg, from Queen Mary University of London, calls this spot his “exposure chamber.” Shouting over the blare of revving engines and sirens, he tells me most people incorrectly assume air pollution is all filtered out by our nose or mouth, or is trapped and then brought up out of the lungs. “What we’re looking at is whether the smallest particles are not only staying in your lung, but moving across into your bloodstream and going around your body,” says Grigg.
After our dose of London air, we head back to the laboratory where I have my finger pricked and a sample of blood prepared for examination. Under the microscope, we can easily see the red disc-shaped cells that transport oxygen around our bodies. It takes a few minutes for me to get my eyes in, but then the air pollution becomes apparent. It appears as tiny black dots stuck to the red blood cells.
These are pieces of carbon and other chemicals, like a miniature lump of coal, that come from the incomplete burning of fuel. They are known as PM 2.5, because the particles are smaller than 2.5 micrometres. I’m not surprised to see air pollution, it’s why we’re doing the experiment, but I can’t escape a feeling of being dirtied, contaminated… sullied by it.
Researcher Dr Norrice Liu has looked at more than a dozen volunteers’ blood samples as part of a study. On average, one in every two to three thousand red blood cells had picked up a hitch-hiking piece of pollution. That might not sound like much, but scale it up to the full five litres of blood in an adult and the researchers estimate there could be 80 million red blood cells transporting pollution around our bodies
Read the full article from The BBC here: Read More
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