Iraqi Air

Courtesy wired.com

The gunfire rattles overhead as you hear the blades of a helicopter turn in swirls of angry diligence. Grenade shrapnel stings the air with shards of fiery metal, and smoke exhaust from tanks and other motorized vehicles fill your senses with foul matter produced by machines.

This is a problem with the air in Iraq. The fights and skirmishes here involving heavy artillery are filling the air with pollutants like metal fragments and other bad particles. The soldiers are breathing these in, and report "increased wheezing, coughing, allergy symptoms and chest pain."

Another large contributing factor to the air pollution is the fact that Iraq still uses a lot of leaded gasoline, which produces many pollutants and small particles. The natural dust storms (which occur about twenty times per year) also raise buried/settled particles from the ground and throw them near or into the soldiers.

We need to be protecting our soldiers. The wounds they get (if any) should be from enemies, not their environment. They're brave enough to risk their own well-being for us, and the least we could do would be to protect their respiratory system as well.

For more on this subject, check out the article on Wired here.

-Cambium