Breathing better air

By: Dori Jenkins

        The efforts to reduce the air pollution in the area of Los Angeles, California, are beginning to pay off. Many kids who are growing up there today have better lung function then those raised in the area almost 20 years ago, according to a new University of Southern California study of exactly 2,000 children. A sophomore at Seckman High School, Gabby Blanchard, says, “If these facts are true for California, then they should be the same for other areas similar to Los Angles in the United States because we have similar lifestyles as those children that live in California.”
Researchers compared the respiratory health of the kids tested between the years 2007 and 2011 to a group that was examined between 1994 and 1998. When they were tested, all of the children in the study were between the ages of 11 and 15, which is when your lungs grow the most, and all came from the same neighborhoods. The later group had better lung capacity, especially among those kids with asthma. Surprisingly, poor lung function dropped from nearly 8% to 3.6% among the 15 year olds.
California has been working to get rid of the car and truck engines and fuels that generate the most pollution. A freshman at Seckman High School, Mikayla Hirschman, says, “People from all over should be working to make the air less polluted and help each other out with our health, not just the people in California!” Cleaning up oil refineries, manufacturing plants, and polluting products like paints and solvents has helped too. The efforts have resulted in major gains for kids’ respiratory health and a far less smoggy LA compared with two decades ago. Scientists say there’s still more work to be done to reduce harmful ozone damage and fine particles in the air. The area still has a way to go before it meets federal health standards for these air quality factors.