'The latest work unveils this mechanism through a series of meticulous experiments showing that cells carrying dormant mutations can turn cancerous when exposed to PM2.5 particles. The pollutant is the equivalent of the ignition spark on a gas hob.
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Rosamund Kissi-Debrah, whose nine-year-old daughter Ella’s death in 2013 was attributed by a coroner to illegal levels of air pollution, said there continues to be a “lack of joined-up thinking” about pollution and health. “You can pump all the money you want into the NHS, but unless you clear up the air, more and more people will become ill,” she said. “My concern regarding global health is that every year we churn out the figures – air pollution causes nine million premature deaths – but no one is held accountable.” ''Scientists have uncovered how air pollution causes lung cancer in groundbreaking research that promises to rewrite our understanding of the disease.
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..Globally, about 300,000 lung cancer deaths in 2019 were attributed to exposure to fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5, contained in air pollution.
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The latest work unveils this mechanism through a series of meticulous experiments showing that cells carrying dormant mutations can turn cancerous when exposed to PM2.5 particles. The pollutant is the equivalent of the ignition spark on a gas hob.
In laboratory studies, Swanton’s team showed that mice that had been engineered to carry mutations in a gene called EGFR, linked to lung cancer, were far more likely to develop cancer when exposed to the pollutant particles. They also revealed that the risk is mediated by an inflammatory protein, called interleukin-1 beta (IL1B), released as part of the body’s immune response to PM2.5 exposure. When the mice were given drugs to block the protein, they were less vulnerable to the pollutants.
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“It’s a wake-up call on the impact of pollution on human health,” said Swanton. “You cannot ignore climate health. If you want to address human health, you have to address climate health first.”
Rosamund Kissi-Debrah, whose nine-year-old daughter Ella’s death in 2013 was attributed by a coroner to illegal levels of air pollution, said there continues to be a “lack of joined-up thinking” about pollution and health. “You can pump all the money you want into the NHS, but unless you clear up the air, more and more people will become ill,” she said. “My concern regarding global health is that every year we churn out the figures – air pollution causes nine million premature deaths – but no one is held accountable.”
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Prof Allan Balmain, a cancer geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco, said the findings also had implications for our understanding of how smoking causes cancer. “Both air pollution and cigarette smoke contain lots of promoting substances. This has been known since the early 1960s but has essentially been ignored, as everyone was focused on mutations,” he said. “The tobacco companies are now saying that smokers should switch to vaping as this reduces exposure to mutagens, and therefore the cancer risk is going to go away. This is not true, as our cells get mutations anyway, and there is evidence that vaping can induce lung disease and cause inflammation similar to promoters.” '
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Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution, September 10, 2022
Context(WHO air quality)(2021-2030) - '..by 2030 .. a complete ban on wood burning would be necessary, as would less livestock farming and less air traffic.'WHO: Air pollution is worse than we thought - but there's hope we can fix it(PFAS) - Pollution: 'Forever chemicals' in rainwater [in most locations on Earth] exceed safe levelsEstimate: October, 2025 – Safire Plasma (beyond fusion) Reactors commercially available – Abundance