Diesel death zones: particulate matter

A street without cars in Century City

Automobiles are a basic part of our lives, but they are exposing us to cancer.  New dimensions of that danger are exposed in this article today in the LA Times by Tony Barboza.

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-freeway-pollution-what-you-can-do-20171230-htmlstory.html

My friend Kathy McTaggart died of non-small-cell lung cancer in 2012 at age 69.  She had never smoked, so the source of her disease was particles in the air we breathe.

Particles are airborne as much as a mile from the freeway at night and in the early morning when air currents move, but only 500-600 feet in the daytime.

• Keep your windows shut, experts say.  
• Run air filters.  
• Don't exercise or live near a freeway, especially where there are interchanges or jammed traffic.
• Keep your windows shut while driving.

But everyone in Los Angeles lives not too far from a freeway.

And even if all cars were electrical, the friction on rubber tires and brakes and lubricating oils creates fine particles.

Here's part of Barboza's report:

It’s especially unhealthful to live near freeways and roads frequented by diesel trucks, which spew many times more harmful gases and particles than cars. Diesel particulate matter, carcinogen-laden soot that deposits deep in the lungs, is responsible for the bulk of the cancer risk from air pollution and more than 1,000 early deaths a year in California.

Experts are most concerned about people living near ports, warehouse distribution centers and other freight corridors. Asthma rates and cancer risk there can be so elevated that physicians have labeled it the “diesel death zone.”

An air-monitoring station next to a truck-congested stretch of the 60 Freeway in Ontario had the highest levels of fine-particle pollution, or soot, of all near-roadway sites in the nation, according to 2015 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data. About 217,000 vehicles a day passed by in 2015, more than 29,000 of them trucks.

I don't know what to do about this problem.  Stop driving?  Move to somewhere far from freeways and power plants, whether coal or nuclear or other?

I will do what I can: encourage you to read this article researched by Tony Barboza and published by the Los Angeles Times.

Rest in Peace: Laurie Becklund

After the lumpectomy, after the radiation, we are told to take an anti-estrogen pill daily for five years, and then we are pronounced "five-year survivors."

"Have a nice life," Laurie Becklund's doctors told her at that point.

The part they don't stress is that one in ten of us still has micro-metastases after our treatment and will develop problems with cancer later.

Laurie died of metastasized breast cancer on Sunday, Feb. 8, 2015, exactly two weeks ago.  Her breast cancer had returned 13 years after her first diagnosis in 1996, and she lived almost six years after it returned.  

Today her family and friends put on a five-star memorial service, which my husband attended.  (I choose to attend my usual monthly Women-Church liturgy.)  She was an award-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times and had written several books.

Here's the final piece Laurie wrote, "As I Lay Dying," which appeared on a full page of the op-ed pages today in the Los Angeles Times.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-becklund-breast-cancer-komen-20150222-story.html

William Faulkner never imagined that his novel, As I Lay Dying, would bear such strange fruit.

Laurie was born in 1948, as was I.  

She applied to be part of Stanford University's freshman class of 1966, but she was turned down.  The foolish selection committee still goes for students who have 1) achieved in sports, 2) held offices in high school government or edited high school newspapers or yearbooks, 3) achieved in music or the arts --in addition to having 4.0 grades.  

Instead of Laurie, the committee chose me and my neighbor Shelley Surpin, now an entertainment lawyer; neither of us did anything particularly noticeable with our talents, unlike Laurie.  Perhaps they chose me because they needed a few from Bakersfield and the San Joaquin Valley.  Laurie came from the San Diego area, where there were many qualified applicants.  

Note about The Ratio: one-third of the entering students were female.  Two-thirds of the seats in the class went to males.  If Stanford had not been such a sexist place, as well as sports-ist, Laurie would have entered the class.

Instead Laurie earned her BA from Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, run by a group of nuns who took the Vatican II direction to heart and soon shed their habits and their subservience.  Cardinal McIntyre tried to squelch them by shutting down donations to the college, which had to close.   

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisters_of_the_Immaculate_Heart_of_Mary

Pat Reif was among them, an activist for civil rights, against nuclear weapons, and for peace.  She later founded a master's degree program in feminist spirituality at Immaculate Heart College.

http://articles.latimes.com/2002/mar/28/local/me-reif28

In this environment, Laurie flourished.  She learned activism and advocacy for women.  It's not surprising that she went much further than the sweetie-pies who went to Stanford in 1966 and married a classmate, as did I.

Laurie went to Columbia School of Journalism and did important work for the LA Times.  She didn't marry until age 32.  

Her reporting exposed the government death squads in El Salvador in the 1980s.  

http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-laurie-becklund-20150210-story.html

Laurie, the trajectory of your life and that of mine crossed in several ways.  Our husbands both worked at the LA Times--and you too were among those talented journalists.   

Our lives both were touched by the Immaculate Heart sisters.

You had one daughter (wise in just one), while I had three.

Breast cancer entered your life in 1996 but waited until 2014 to enter mine.

You wrote several books as I edited just one (the reverse of our daughter totals).  You were a much better reporter than I.

You died this month from metastasized breast cancer; I still live.

Cancer may get me in a few years, or maybe my end will be with Alzheimer's disease.

The important thing is that we were each created and loved by God and did our best to serve our Maker.

We both strove to answer the question posed by Evelyn Underhill in her book The Spiritual Life:

...what function must this life fulfill in the great and secret economy of God?