Yan, Qi. (2021, May 14). “Metabolomic and EPIGENOMIC Assessment of Air Pollution and Pesticides Exposure in California.” EScholarship, University of California. Retrieved August 14, 2021, from escholarship.org/uc/item/1h5654mk

    Air pollutants and pesticides have become more abundant in our state’s atmosphere in the last years. This is believed to cause “various health outcomes such as birth outcomes, cardiovascular diseases, neurodevelopmental disorders, and neurodegenerative diseases” amongst us. The toxins circulating the air from pollution have been known to cause health issues, but are starting to become the cause for much more than we initially thought. Scientists began studying the first trimester of pregnancy and the effects the pollutants had on Californians, and they found “that in total, we identified 432 metabolomic features that discriminated between the high (n=98) and low air pollution exposed group (n=62)”, which essentially means that inflammatory and stress levels were much higher due to the poor air quality.

    This article went into detail about the effects that air pollution and poor air quality had on us as humans, and not so much as what it does to our environment, especially in California. This is yet another thing we must worry about, as climate change has begun to seriously affect our air and what we breathe in every day. Soon, the absurd amounts of toxins and chemicals in our atmosphere will begin to be more detrimental to our bodies than anything else. I wonder what our future holds when we will soon have been breathing in cigarette fumes every day for the past years, and what that will do to our lungs. I am certain that it will cause a surplus of lung cancer cases, as air pollution could eventually become more deadly to humanity than cigarettes are. In sum, this is another wake up call for us to preserve our breathable air and atmosphere in general.