空气污染会死人吗（空气污染会导致什么自然灾害）

Air pollution doesn't just make it hard to breathe–it may also increase the risk that people will take their own lives.

A new study in seven cities across South Korea has uncovered a clear association between suicide and spikes of particulate pollution. Meanwhile, researchers who in the 1990s linked air pollution to asthma in a large group of Taiwanese children have now found that those with the condition were subsequently more likely to have killed themselves.

To examine the role of pollution, researchers led by Chang Soo Kim of Yonsei University in Seoul linked records of more than 4000 suicides to measurements of PM10–airborne particles with a diameter of 10 micrometers or less, which include the soot from vehicle exhausts.

Kim's team found that suicides were more common in the two days following a spike in pollution. They considered PM10 measurements on a scale from the highest and lowest levels recorded, calculating that people were nine percent more likely to kill themselves following a spike in pollution rising across the middle 50 percent of recorded values. For people with cardiovascular disease, which has already been linked with particulate pollution, the increase was almost 19 percent.

Scientists have only recently started to study the relationship between respiratory disease and mental health, says David Callahan at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. Last year, his team revealed that 7.5 percent of people with asthma in the US reported suffering serious psychological distress, compared with just three percent of the population as a whole.

Where air pollution is involved, the problem may not only be that as people's physical symptoms worsen, they become more distressed. Kim suggests that PM10s may also cause nerve inflammation, affecting mental health through a direct biological mechanism.

《新科学家》周刊：空气污染不仅会让人呼吸困难，还可能增加人们的自杀几率。

在韩国7个城市进行的一项最新研究发现，自杀和空气中的微粒污染峰值有着明确的联系。与此同时，曾在上世纪90年代发现台湾大量儿童的哮喘与空气污染有关的研究人员日前发现，那些患有哮喘的人更容易出现自杀的倾向。 为了研究污染的影响，由首尔延世大学的金昌苏（音）带领的研究小组分析了4000过个自杀案例与PM10（空气中直径不超过10微米的污染颗粒，其中包括汽车尾气中的污染物）的数量关系。

研究发现，在污染出现峰值后的两天，自杀现象会增多。他们将PM10的数量根据历史最高和最低纪录设定一个范围，并通过计算得出，当污染出现超过中间值的高峰时，人们的自杀率就会增加9%。对于有心血管病的人来说，自杀风险更是会增加19%。

美国疾病控制和预防中心的戴维-卡拉汉说，科学家最近才开始研究呼吸系统与精神健康的关系。去年，他的研究小组调查发现，美国7.5%的哮喘病患者都有严重的精神忧虑，而在总人口中这个比例只有3%。 在涉及空气污染时，问题可能就不仅仅是随着人身体状况的恶化，他们就会变得更加抑郁。金指出，PM10也会导致神经炎症，从而通过直接的生理机制影响精神健康。