News Analysis

Have you ever looked up into the night sky, excited to see the beautiful constellations,
and are promptly disappointed seeing that there’s only one or two stars to be seen? What about
catching “a breath of fresh air outside” only to wish you were back inside after having a hard
time catching your breath. As you can see, the small joys of clean air are surely over it seems.
Air pollution is only getting worse. But could there be a way to relieve some of the air pollution
entering our bodies? Researchers from the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, Harvard
Chan School of Public Health, Boston University School of Medicine seem to think they have a
way to halve the poor effects on your lungs due to air pollution. How you might ask? NSAID
medication such as aspirin. These researchers have found when conducting a study of people
within the ages of 70-80 that the use of these pills halved the effects of air pollution on the lungs
and was beneficial.( “Aspirin May Halve Air Pollution Harms.” ScienceDaily, ScienceDaily, 2
Oct. 2019) Researcher mainly focuses their studies on “aspirin” and found that the effects of
taking it lessened inflammation due to the air.( “Aspirin May Halve Air Pollution Harms.”
ScienceDaily, ScienceDaily, 2 Oct. 2019).

While this news is great and could be beneficial to some people who are already on pain
medication, we also need to try and solve air pollution on its own, we cannot depend on
something like medications obviously. In this study aspirin was seen to have helped protect the
lungs for a short period of time and in fighting against bad air quality, but is it the only solution?
No way. It is of great significance to understand that air pollution is no easy fix, and should be
helped through other tasks.

This information could be beneficial to this society suffering from very poor air quality. It is
also important to understand that while news like this sounds great, it’s good to know what
source it’s coming from. As we can see, these researchers were from schools of health and
medicine. I don’t think these type of researchers would purposely try and sway us for selfish
reasons but it’s important to know that you can’t take every single article you read to be the
most correct information. Another thing we can consider is the audience they focused on in the
article. They chose to focus on an older age group, most likely due to the fact the majority of
older people take NSAID’s daily and they wanted to keep the control the same. Reading this
article was very insightful but also made me wonder if it would have the same effects on
everyone, including myself.

Reading this article opened my eyes more to the effects of air pollution and also in
learning about the influence of medicine in our world today. This article gave me a new
perspective on medicine and in its benefits, and also in learning more about the great influence
some medicines can have in protecting your lungs. In conclusion, this article was a great way to
think about all the concepts, readings, etc. from this biology class and in seeing how they apply
to the real world.