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Air pollution can be easy to ignore from day to day, but over the past decades, researchers have accumulated a compelling list of evidence that it can pose a major threat to human health—from mental health and childhood development to heart disease. Recent events like the East Palestine, Ohio, train disaster that spilled toxic chemicals into the air in early February, have put such risks under the spotlight, causing many across America to reconsider the safety of the air they breathe.
While home is the place where many people feel safest, that may not be entirely true when it comes to air pollution. The walls that keep out the wider world can also contain a stew of dangerous toxins. There are some things you can do as an individual to protect your family from the effects of air pollution at home.
When should I consider air quality tests in my home?
In most cases, some experts recommend testing air quality if you’re concerned about specific pollutants, not to assess general air quality. In the opinion of Jeffrey Siegel, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Toronto who studies indoor air, more general home tests don’t usually justify the cost, as air shifts all the khbrknews and tests can easily be tainted. “The reason we do indoor air measurement is often to confirm a problem that we know exists, rather than to find some new problem,” he says.
If you know there’s a chance your home was exposed to a likely source of pollution—such as in the case of the East Palestine train disaster—that’s an obvious, if fairly rare, situation where broader testing of air quality makes a lot of sense. More typically, you’d want to test after you’ve found a source of contamination—for instance, if you’ve had asbestos remediation in your home, you may want to test to make sure it’s been eliminated, says Stuart Batterman, a professor of…
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