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Short-Term Exposure To Diesel Fumes Causes Changes In Gene Expression
BarbaraHudson writes: The Vancouver Sun is reporting on experiments using human volunteers showing that just two hours of exposure to diesel exhaust fumes led to biological changes; some genes were switched on while others turned off. The air quality during the diesel fume exposures is said to be comparable to a Beijing highway or shipping ports in British Columbia. The next step is for researchers to study how changes in gene expression from air pollution affect the human body over the long term, since the study shows genes may be vulnerable to pollution without producing any obvious or immediate symptoms of ill health."
Let's try two hours of exposure to Slashdot and see what sorts of gene expression changes are detected.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Short term exposure to a common pollutant causes massive mutation possibilities, and coupled with the rise in cancers (noted along major highways for example) perhaps you're too dumb to study this study instead?
Cyclamate is banned and you will get cancer if you drink five pallets of soda sweetened by it for five years.
That can't be good either.
... to express themselves and gassing them with diesel fuel is is just wrong because 1st amendment.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Short-Term Exposure To Diesel Fumes Causes Changes In Gene Expression
Diesel engines are a blessing. I ought to know. I've owned Cummins stock for many years.
Thanks for, ah...expressing yourself.
Hopefully all those morons who are ""rollin coal" will be sterile so they can't pass on their defective genes to another generation.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
âoeDiesel engine exhaust is a known carcinogen that is responsible for two-thirds of the lifetime cancer risk from air pollution in our region,â Moore said. âoeThe prohibitions that come into effect in 2015 are essential to protect human health by reducing emissions of harmful diesel soot from industrial and construction machines.â
Why is this witch-hunt against diesel fuel? Why not gasoline? Can someone explain to me why the world is up in arms about diesel fuel but calmly ignoring the fact that gasoline engines produce just as much soot, but with finer (and thus more hazardous) particulates? And that they release more unburned hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, although to be fair, direct gasoline injection is erasing that particular problem. Is this just about preventing us from using biofuels?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Do genes turn off and on normally due to environmental conditions? Or just in response to pollutants?
If I visit a warm pristine beach for two hours do genes turn on/off, if I visit a chilly pristine mountain for two hours do genes turn on/off?
We already know something about long-term exposure, based on observing career truck drivers: diesel fumes don't cause weight loss.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Diesel engines, unlike regular gas engines, can run off renewable vegetable oils. Folks run 'em off used french fry oil and such. There's been a lot of money and research flowing toward how bad diesel engines are... You'll notice there's almost no diesel cars in the US, in spite of how they could cut oil imports!
Then we have this study. Loosely translated: Living causes changes in Gene Expression.
More fluff in the media. I swear. Pravda in Russia at the height of the cold war had less bias!
Ultrafine particles (UFP) are probably both the least well-studied and least regulated form of air pollution (IIRC, they're somewhat tricky to reliably measure at all in an uncontrolled environment, let alone measured by a means that can be deployed for routine large-scale monitoring), and there's a small pile of studies showing that they do have health effects, though no one seems to know exactly what the mechanisms or dose-response curves are, or how the short-term effects translate into identifiable disease etiologies. For example, there are studies in both rats[0] and humans[1] consistent with the presence of UFP inhibiting the exercise-stimulated production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a neurological growth factor that is believed to play a key role in multiple psychiatric disorders and even some forms of obesity. There are other studies showing other effects; those were just the ones that particularly came to mind.
I bring this up because although modern diesel engines are far cleaner than the classic models, they are known to produce considerable amounts of UFP pollution. Gasoline engines and various other technologies (laser printers / photocopiers, various forms of precision machining...) aren't entirely innocent, either.
[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22867973
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21708224
Another study found that gene activity changes by 25% when you have the flu.
The old view that genes are static and never change during your life seems less and less accurate.
another gas pedal gone spongy on you, sorry.
you ARE killing us.
park it.
Oh but tobacco smoke is so much more evil. It is the evilest of all airborne contaminants. *fake cough* Oh your tobacco smoke is making me sick! Nevermind all the trucks chugging black exhaust and partially combusted diesel fuel.
No nothing is worse than tobacco smoke. If we execute all the smokers the world will be a perfect utopia.
I love how they try to justify it by by saying none one had an asthmatic event. Same logic tobacco manufacturers use...look at them no signs of breathing problems...until 50 years later when their lungs turn to shit.
There are many occupations that should be available to correlate this -rather direct- attack on one fuel type. Truck Mechanics... Exposed to liquid and exhaust Tunnel operators that sit by many idling diesel trucks Truck drivers that drive older / dirtier vehicles. Volkwagen TDI drivers vs gas powered cars Sea Captains and deckhands that get exposed to bunker The direct assault on Diesel only seems callous at first glance. Am assuming that none of the Study participants never had exposure to diesel ever before. How stressful was the test, and could that have caused measurable changes? How did the test subjects not-know that they were breathing in diesel fumes? Lets do the same test on theater smoke, on second hand tobacco smoke, Farts and other noxious things that don't kill immediately.
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
So we must make being overweight a crime comparable to dumping oil into a town's drinking water supply. Who would have guessed that science after dismissing Lysenkoism to be pseudoscience, now proves it to be actually true.
"600 bucks", they said. "You'll get new jeans", they said. Such a deal!
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Morlocks.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I love the smell of diesel fumes. It reminds me of Chicago, and why I don't live there.
So they're going to defend freedom of speech by denying others their freedom of speech, right?
The most intense diesel fumes I have ever encountered were in a downtown Chicago metro train station. Both on the platforms, and inside the terminal. It was winter, and I think there was some "ventilation" (because it was cold). It was choking and unbelievable.
And as someone who welds, fabricates race cars, and enjoys kimchi, I know something about fumes.
Sure we know all exhaust is bad for you and that the genes are always being turned on and off, there is nothing new in this.
Using methods such as non-thermal plasma for diesel exhaust treatment was a possibility over ten years ago.
http://energy.gov/eere/vehicles/downloads/non-thermal-plasma-based-technologies-aftertreatment-diesel-exhaust
Just more activist trying to cause an another unwarranted hullabaloo. Diesel engines are a blessing. I ought to know. I've owned Cummins stock for many years.
I own stock in Baby Seal Fur Harvester, Inc. Does that make me an expert on threatened species?
I don't think it's something to be too afraid of, obviously we don't want to be breathing that stuff but, everything is connected to everything - that's how the universe works.
I was a maintenance tech at a produce packing plant where we received bulk semi loads of potatoes. We weighed the trucks in and out to calculate the delivery weight. One guy was HUGE! I made sure I watched the digital scale readout as he got out of his truck to get his scale ticket. He was over 600 lbs. He took his papers and then climbed the stairs to the second story office.
Move that study to Valdez, Alaska where you might wonder after seeing the beautiful postcards how it could be so polluted, but just keep your sight on the blue haze of benzene that lays in that basin of the most pristine, picturesue mountains and what used to be the cleanest water on the planet. You'll be very unpleasantly surprised to find out that the tankers are loaded with crude oil with the ventilation open directly into the air and with what everyone thought was a viable vapor recovery system that does not capture the fumes from the loading process because of the volitility of those heavy gases. The air was so bad at one point the EPA dismantled the air quality monitoring station erected to safeguard health concerns. There are, no doubt, biological changes happening in the short and long term to the life up in God's country.
BarbaraHudson, what's this about you ac stalking/harassing & libeling others http://slashdot.org/comments.p... then you had to eat your words for it?
BarbaraHudson, what's this about you ac stalking/harassing & libeling others http://slashdot.org/comments.p... then you had to eat your words for it?
BarbaraHudson, what's this about you ac stalking/harassing & libeling others http://slashdot.org/comments.p... then you had to eat your words for it?
Yeah, sure. Why not, if Jenny McCarthy is an immunologist.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
omg, you likened my theoretical ownership of a non-existent company with Jenny McCarthy's activities.
Even at that remove, I still feel all dirty and need to take a shower. Well played, sir.
I sometimes see four-five diesel schoolbuses idling for half hour next to a school and the associated nearby children. Every day.