And you thought traffic was simply annoying

Remember when I posted a study suggesting that breathing might kill you?  Well, it turns out it might also (or alternately) give you brain damage.  Breathing in traffic, that is.

A study recently published in the journal Environmental Health and reported on in Time and the Los Angeles Times has discovered that freeway air pollution can cause brain damage in mice.

(Ain't that just swell, says the girl living in the city of a million freeways.)

In the study in question, researchers at USC exposed mouse-brain cells in test tubes and live mice to air laced with nanoparticles akin to those resulting from "burning fossil fuels and bits of car parts and weathered pavements" (to quote Time). These nanoparticles are truly nano, perhaps one-thousandth the width of a human hair. You can't see them, and more jarringly, your car can't filter them out of the air you're breathing. After only 10 weeks and 150 hours, "Both the in vitro brain cells and the neurons in the live mice showed similar problems, including signs of inflammation associated with Alzheimer's disease and damage to cells associated with learning and memory" (quoting Time again).

One of the major concerns coming out of this research is for the development of  children living and attending school near highways.  For not only could young people's brain functioning be altered by the nanoparticles constantly found in the air they breathe, but freeway pollution may be in part responsible for autism, and lung development could be stunted by breathing pollution as well.  And that's just what I found out by clicking on USC press releases. Imagine what researchers at other schools are discovering about the dangers of breathing!

What's to be done?  To quote the team that looked at the mouse brains, "That's a huge unknown."

I suppose not living in Los Angeles, Phoenex or Bakersfield would be a good start. Also, stay away from China.

And if you live near a freeway, think about moving! 

(Or I suppose you could look into these attractive partial solutions offered by Amazon.com.)