America returns to its most polluted time

Updated at 11:37 of April 9, 2025

When you inhale a soot microscopic stain, its journey can go like this: the particle enters the nose and goes to the lungs, penetrating even small air sacks that facilitate gas exchange. It can then fall into the bloodstream and flow into the heart or above the hematoencephalic barrier. Most of us inhale some of these small particles every day. But inhaling enough can turn the act of breathing into an existential danger, pushing or worsening asthma, COPDs, respiratory infections and permanent lung damage. In the heart, spots can trigger heart disease, heart attacks and most of the cardiovascular disorders you can think of. Air pollution is also associated with depression and anxiety and higher suicide rates. It can trigger blows and are related to dementia or, even at average levels of this country, Parkinson’s disease.

These particles can also cross the placenta, where they can reduce a baby’s lung function before childbirth. A pre-contaminated baby is also more likely to arrive prematurely and with a lower weight. Exposure to bad air in the uterus is associated with a greater risk of autism, and exposure to childhood has been linked to behavioral and cognitive problems, including lower IQ. A person’s lungs can be developed until the age of 25 and, as Alison Lee, a lung of the Ichn School of Medicine from Mount Sinai, said: “Once you have lost the lung function, you cannot recover -it.” Persistent exposure to air pollution can cause permanent damage, creating health problems for children and preparing them to become more ill adults.

It is difficult to imagine a person who falls dead from air pollution, but he spends all the time. In the United States, it is estimated that the particles kill more than double people than vehicle accidents, in total, about 100,000 to 200,000 people a year, as an underlying factor in chronic diseases or heart attacks, asthma attacks and other sudden events. Although air quality in America has improved, researchers have found that relatively low particles concentrations can cause significant risks.

All of this comes from a toxic and mostly invisible danger, to a large extent the product of burning things by fuel and letting it drift from drifting to air and then to us, which is what happens unless the Government regulates this process. The Trump administration, however, has shown little interest in doing it. Through new aggressive policies and cuts, the administration is taking steps that will foster more pollution while annoying the science that shows the damage. The very air that the North -Americans breathe will probably be less safe.

So far, the EPA has announced that it will pursue a series of environmental rules, including an update by Joe Biden -it is the standards for particles that had to be completely in force by 2032 and that the projected EPA BIDEN would be, only in this year, it would prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 800,000 cases of asthma, up to $ 46 billion in health benefits. It also plans to evaluate a rule that limits the amount of mercury and arsenic aerransportation that can release the plants. In a statement announcing one of these deployed, the EPA said that the United States has already gained great gain in air quality, which means that they are sufficient. In response to a comments request, a spokesman for the agency told me that the priority of EPA administrator Lee Zeldin is “clean air, land and water for all north -Americans”.

The air in the United States is certainly cleaner than when industrial air pollution was incorporated into the sky without imitating. Over the past 25 years, particle air pollution in the country has dropped more than 30 percent. However, at least one in three north -Americans live in a place where air is still a health danger. The standard of particle particles that Zeldin intends to go back is almost twice as much as the limit that the World Health Organization recommends protecting health.

Return rules will take time, but the U.S. air quality could be worsening temporarily. The EPA told the companies last month that they can simply email the agency if they want an exemption from certain pollution regulations and that “the President will make a decision”. However, they approach these reasons, this opens up a later door. Recent cuts to EPA staff almost surely mean that the application will also suffer. In the meantime, worsening the fire stations, fed by climate warming, are reversing decades of air quality progress in this country. And ignoring and even provoking climate change, as Donald Trump’s administration does, it will produce worse fire stations. He told me that the country is heading to its most polluted past “will become a stronger trajectory,” said Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist at Washington University who helped to expose the connection between fire smoke and the risk of dementia.

Administration cuts to scientific research also mean that the impact of its deregulation can never be fully understood. In recent months, the Government has demolished some air quality data and has canceled aid; It also plans to dissolve an entire EPA division dedicated to studying how the environment affects public health. These actions create a kind of naivete with intent: You cannot regulate what cannot be proven is detrimental and no damage can be shown without research.

And you can’t certainly not solve what you still don’t know is a problem. More recent conclusions on how air pollution can add a body-by getting worse for mental health or triggering more cases of neurodegenerative diseases, for example, it has not yet been included in EPA risk-benefit evaluations of air quality regulations, added Casey. “I think we are often underestimating the true impact,” he said.

When I called Marianthi-Anna Kiumourtzoglou, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, had just learned that the Trump administration had canceled its subsidy to study how the impacts of climate change, including air pollution, alter the cognitive function on aged people. (At the beginning of this year, he was also dismissed from his designation to the Advisory Committee Scientific Air Clean of the EPA, along with the rest of the court.) However, the basic foundations of air pollution have been studied enough that Kiumourtzoglou knows how the current rolls will affect the North – Adverse. ” “Our cognitive functions will be worse: Alzheimer’s progression, Parkinson’s progression.” Depression and anxiety related to pollution can increase. Even slightly increasing the risk or rate of any of these at the population level can reduce the quality of life and, ultimately, productivity, he said. A more sick country is poorer.

Compared to smoking, for example, the risk of an individual to inhale a dangerous amount of air pollution and then have the affected health because it is relatively small, he said, but “the problem is that few people smoke and everyone breathes.” If a part of the cognitive function of the population decreases, even a little, the general impact is huge.

Kiumourtzoglou also asks how much the Trump administration will drive the idea that air pollution should not be a concern for the North -Americans. When the Heritage Foundation published a report in December that made the radical case that there is no definitive link between air pollution and bad public health results, it was ignored. But after seeing the promulgation of other goals of the Heritage Foundation, he is concerned that the current administration can be taken seriously. The Heritage Report seeks to question the validity of the decades of science, in part, arguing that studies that link air pollution to the effects of health do not demonstrate causation, because they are not randomized or controlled. (After this story was published, Diana Furytgott-Roth, the director of Heritage’s Energy, Climate and Environment Center, said that the report aimed to guide federal policies, and showed that “there is no causal bond between particles and heart attacks and deaths.”

It is an attack not only in the research of aerial policy, but also in an entire scientific approach. Most public health research is observational out of necessity, because exposing people to air pollution in a laboratory environment to see how bad they have, for example, it would not be ethical. In contrast, scientists collect data from already exposed populations and try to analyze how different variables affected the health of people. For decades, researchers have developed biostatic methods to determine the causal relationships of large study groups.

When EPA scientists and regulators link a pollutant and a health result, “ they are not doing this evaluation in one or two or three studies. They are decades of scientific publications, ” said Corwin Zigler, a Biostatist at the University of Brown, who served in an EPA scientific advice group on air pollution under Biden administration. He was not surprised by the logic behind the Heritage Foundation’s report: the leader of the Air Air Policy Advisory Group of Trump’s previous Administration had begun to see doubts about the basic research on air pollution. In response, the national academies of science, engineering and medicine performed a significant review of the way EPA evaluates causal relationships, and although he recommended that the EPA process be more transparent, he found his scientifically robust methods. Zigler said that he has no doubt that the particles cause damage to current levels in the United States: “This is scientific consensus. This is taken very seriously all the limitations of any particular scientific study.”

Studies on how entire populations are damaged by air pollution are framed in probabilities and percentages, but represent a multitude of individuals for which daily life has been worse. For Lee, the lung of Mount Sinai, the work became personal a few years ago, when his son, now 5, began to have asthma attacks that would send him to the emergency room. Asthma is a common disease that an attack may seem like a routine and manageable health problem. But anyone who has had a serious will say different. Throughout the years of reporting on air pollution, I have had asthma attacks described how to feel that someone is trampling in all their weight on the shore or as if suddenly a fish outside the water, suffocating on Earth. It is a traumatic event. Lee, knowing what he does about air pollution, decided to move his family from New York City to suburbs a year and a half ago; They have not been in the emergency room since then.

“It is clear that we know that where you live determines your health,” Lee told me, but few people can choose like her, to increase their lives to breathe cleaner air. The Trump Administration is also cutting off programs aimed at addressing exactly these geographical disparities, while working to get worse for everyone. The EPA administrator, Zeldin, said that these publications are part of the administration’s plan to “trigger the golden age of North -American Prosperity.” But prosperity does not mean quenching death at home or depriving a son of cognitive capacity. Any wealth that is promised here is closely paid up by others.