The health benefits of better air
This article seems to make fantastic jumps from the believable -- mortality from overall air pollution (e.g. in Delhi) to the frankly unbelievable -- your ultrasonic humidifier supposedly reducing your life by nearly an hour each night, or that a daily commute between Newark and NYC takes half a year off your life.<p>According to this logic, anyone who works in the subway should be dying, what, 10 years earlier? Which is obviously not happening.<p>Similarly, it seems impossible to believe that the minerals in the air from humidifiers are equivalently dangerous to factory pollution or cigarette smoke. Different categories of particles are going to affect the body differently, no? I mean, our body <i>requires</i> minerals -- we're drinking them in our water all day long -- while certain factories may be belching out straight-up poison.<p>These statistics are just not passing the smell test. They seem to be extrapolations of extrapolations of extrapolations. This article's conclusions don't seem even remotely convincing.