Acute Bronchitis Monologue

The school nurse sends your daughter home early from primary school. Her cough is much worse now, each convulsion rattling her tiny frame. But she’s been coughing for two weeks now. The flu medication the doctors prescribed is clearly not working. You discount the idea of it being a virus and consider something more serious. Google tells you acute bronchitis can last over a month, and your child has all the symptoms—constant coughing, shortness of breath, loss of appetite. She complains she’s tired all the time. You anxiously consider the possibility of pneumonia—like any worried parent would—but rule it out as hypochondriasis. You’ll wait for a second opinion from a specialist before jumping to conclusions.
The doctor says it’s not a virus,
bronchitis, or pneumonia.
It’s lung cancer.
This seems like an impossible scenario, a maudlin script cooked up by the lurid writers of A Walk to Remember and The Notebook. Children do not get lung cancer. That’s reserved for chain-smokers and industrial workers exposed to exotic chemicals, perhaps radon.
But the tragic truth is that an alarming number of children are being diagnosed with chronic lung problems, including cancer, solely because of air pollution, especially in the developing nations such as India and China, which depend heavily on dirty coal power.
In 2013, an eight-year-old girl from the coastal Jiangsu Province of China was diagnosed with lung cancer, the youngest ever in that country.
With China’s rapid development, dust and air pollution are prevalent throughout most regions. However, it has become particularly bad in the metropolises of Shanghai and Beijing, where citizens stalk through smog-ridden streets almost daily, armed with only flimsy surgical masks, if anything. This picture has become a common sight in newspapers and online media across the globe, and stands as a warning to other nations of the consequences of rapid expansion and unmonitored air pollution.
Of course, most developed countries have strong laws on air pollution in populated areas; nevertheless, despite efforts to moderate emissions and increase efficiency, our mushrooming populations and wasteful practices continue to strain the environment and our own health.
In Dubai, for example, the opulent capitalist center of the Middle East, a well-heeled local sitting on the balcony of a luxury villa on one of the fronds of the man-made Palm Islands will, more often than not, be disappointed at being unable to admire the nearby half-mile-high Burj Khalifa tower because of the pea-soup haze in the
way.
While it’s safe to say that only a few countries have such alarmingly poor air quality, the problem continues to grow around the world. Researchers have already begun to question how this global increase in air pollution will impact future generations. Will it result in more tragic cases like China’s eight-year-old? We cannot know for certain, but most scientists can confirm that exposure to such levels of pollution will never do us any good. To prevent us from ever having to find out the full repercussions of such a future, there needs to be drastic change today. Deforestation needs to be reduced; stronger policies on car emissions need to be promulgated, particularly when it comes to older vehicles; and laws that regulate particulate emissions from industries such as coal power need to be established.
Eight-year-olds should not be getting cancer. Nor should they be living in an environment where their health is jeopardized every day. Though these issues seem far away and irrelevant to most of our lives, global air pollution is increasing everywhere.