Air pollution! It’s bad for you but somehow big industries and the government loves making you breath it in and you love participating in activities that puts out more of it. One such negative consequence of air pollution is the increase risk of lung infections including from SARS and Influenza, and now also COVID-19.

Published in JAMA Open Network, researchers from Stockholm, Sweden, of Karolinksa Instituet released results from an observational study linking the link between air pollution and positive COVID-19 PCR tests where traffic-related air pollutant lead to a greater likelihood of positive tests.

Using data from SmiNet, a national communicable disease registry, researchers identified 425 individuals who tested positive for COVID-19 between May 2020 and March 2021 with the average age of 26.

Daily outdoor concentrations of air pollution was estimated using dispersion models tracking PM10, PM2.5, black carbon, and nitrogen oxides pollutants. Results showed a positive association between exposure to PM10 and PM2.5 two days before a positive test and black carbon one day before. There was no association between positive tests and nitrogen oxides.

The overall increase risks was around 7% per particle exposure between quartiles.

“Seven percent doesn’t sound much, but given that everyone is more or less exposed to air pollutants, the association may be of great significance to public health,” stated Erik Melén, one of the authors of the study.

So maybe pollution control policies should be higher up on the priority lists of many governments and companies…and you should probably be a man and walk more…just saying. It’s just kind of an idea to protect people from being sick.

Z Yu et al. Association of short-term air pollution exposure with SARS-CoV-2 infection among young adults in Sweden. JAMA Open Network. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.8109