The World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared that diesel fumes are very much capable of causing lung cancer and even went on to state that such fumes are even more carcinogenic than second-hand cigarette smoke!
<!--more-->This has prompted the WHO to enter diesel into the “known carcinogen” level, which calls for much concern for those who are heavily exposed to sooty sulphur containing particulates.
This really needs to be well-addressed over here in Malaysia, since we only have seven and a half years to go in order to declare ourselves a fully developed nation. That’s right, before we know it, 2020 is going to be right on top of us and in less than 8 years, we’re going to need to implement standards to help elevate our health standards to a level where it’s on par, if not better than those in developed countries, by really getting those trucks and busses off our roads that belch out plumes of black soot – now carcinogenic black soot.
Sadly, our diesel fuel isn’t on par with Europe for example and if we make that jump, there’s going to be a lot of Malaysians out there that’s going to feel the pinch – if not worse and we’re not able to bridge that gap just yet till we’ve resolved much of our socio-economic issues from education, standards of living, disparity between the rich and the poor, health-care and so on.
At the moment, other developed nations do not face much of these problems, thanks to their legislation which requires diesel engines to burn more cleaner and as well as how much diesel fumes their workers are exposed to. Hopefully we do to.
Dr. Otis W. Brawley, medical director of the American Cancer Society, has praised the ruling by the W.H.O.’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, saying his group “has for a long time had concerns about diesel” and that the cancer society is likely to come to the same conclusion the next time its scientific committee meets.
“I don’t think it’s bad to have a diesel car,” Dr. Brawley added. “I don’t think it’s good to breathe its exhaust. I’m not concerned about people who walk past a diesel vehicle, I’m a little concerned about people like toll collectors, and I’m very concerned about people like miners, who work where exhaust is concentrated.”
Debra T. Silverman, a cancer researcher for the United States government who headed an influential study published in March that led to Tuesday’s decision, said she was “totally in support” of the W.H.O. ruling and expected that the government would soon follow suit in declaring diesel exhaust a carcinogen.
Dr. Silverman, chief of environmental epidemiology for the National Cancer Institute mentions that her study of 50 years of exposure to diesel fumes by 12,000 miners indicated that non-smoking miners heavily exposed to diesel fumes over the years were t-times more likely to get lung cancer than non-smokers.
After a week-long scientific meeting in Lyon, France, it was then that The W.H.O. made their decision that diesel exhaust now shares the W.H.O.’s Group 1 carcinogen status with smoking, asbestos, ultraviolet radiation, alcohol and other elements that pose cancer risks.
Source: Time Healthland
pls help guys.....