“Air pollution, it turns out, can change your genes, so the pollution you breathe can damage your children and grandchildren too. In 2008, Kari Nadeau was finishing her pediatric residency at Stanford University in California, studying the connection between underactive regulatory T cells—a hereditary trait—and childhood asthma. One day, she caught a PBS Nova episode on the exploding field of epigenetics, the ways our specific environment can modify our genes, and how those changes can be passed to our offspring, their offspring and so on, and she was struck with an idea. She went back to her research data, and this time organized her subjects by ZIP code. A pattern became exceedingly obvious: All the children with underactive regulatory T cells lived in Fresno.
Fresno, in California’s Central Valley, is the most polluted city in the state, due to a deadly combination of diesel exhaust and agricultural pesticides. Most residents are immigrant farm workers and people of color, many living below the poverty line. And lots of them have asthma. “The babies are born with it,” says Nadeau, today a physician and professor at Stanford. The babies’ lungs never have a chance to develop normally in the womb because their mothers live in a high-pollution area. When a pregnant woman takes a breath, the tiny molecules of air pollution pass through her lungs and into her bloodstream, slipping into the blood cells—which flow to her fetus, delaying and damaging its lung development. The fetus’s lungs, Nadeau explains, may grow fewer alveoli, the grape-like clusters in which air is taken and oxygen is separated and diffused to the blood. In other words, the babies are born with diminished lung capacity. (Plus, she adds, evidence suggests that lungs continue to develop until we’re about 25 years old; she suspects air pollution will be stunting alveoli development the whole time.)
Perhaps more alarming, those same pollution molecules slip into the blood that feeds ovaries and testicles. If those are altered, so are the offspring created by the eggs and sperm those organs produce. In fact, Nadeau was able to infer that the genes of her Fresno patients were fundamentally altered so that they would be more likely to develop asthma and allergies. And of course, those genes could be passed down to their children, and their children’s children, even if those later generations have moved away and are no longer exposed to the pollution.”
– Choking to Death in Detroit: Flint Isn’t Michigan’s Only Disaster
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