Hot MedFax

Overweight or obese? Now you have something new to worry about.  You suffer more from air pollution . That's because people who weigh a lot breathe seven to 50% more air than the res of us, and that includes pollution, according to newswise.com.  The really sad part of this is that, f or overweight or obese children, daily inhalation rates are 10-24% higher than for normal weight children.   It's not just inhaling air that smells bad.  Breathing it makes them more vulnerable to asthma and other pulmonary diseases.   If overweight or obese people inhale more air compared to those with normal weight, does this mean that elite athletes may also be more vulnerable to contaminants in the air?   A cross-country skier in a competition can breathe up to 41.2 m3 per day, while a cyclist participating in the Tour de France breathes an average of 45.9 m3 per day over the 21-day race.  But this is peak inhalation, which cannot be maintained daily over an...

So now we know.   Air pollution does cause cancer.  At least, in China and other rapidly developing countries like Addis Ababa, where the fumes from bulldozers to minibuses creating all this growth daily "pump out black plumes" according to Tyler Falk of smartplanet.com. And these plumes -- the outdoor air pollution that "plagues urban areas from Ethiopia to China -- are causing lung cancer. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has officially labeled outdoor air pollution as a leading cause of cancer [PDF] after reviewing 1,000 scientific papers on the subject from five continents," writes Falk. And it kills 223,000 people a year, who die from lung cancer as a result of breathing in the polluted air. “The air we breathe has become polluted with a mixture of cancer-causing substances,” Falk quotes Kurt Straif, head of IARC's Monographs Section. “We now know that outdoor air pollution is not only a major risk to ...