Items Tagged with 'pollution health effects'

Imagine that you are attending a community workshop about cleaning up the environment in your city. Local environmental justice activists are there to explain how the effects of pollution are disproportionately higher in your area than in other parts of the county. After everyone is seated, the workshop leader says, “Before we start, I want to ask for some information. Will everyone here who lives adjacent to a polluting site please stand?”

Air pollution in Europe comes with a high price tag, according to a new report from the European Environment Agency (EEA). While policies have improved air quality overall, air pollution is still the main environmental health hazard, resulting in high costs for health care systems, unhealthy workers and an estimated 400,000 premature deaths in Europe in 2011.

Using a new imaging technique, National Institutes of Health researchers have found that the biological machinery that builds DNA can insert molecules into the DNA strand that are damaged as a result of environmental exposures.