Every year when winter rolls around, a billion people in India are left breathing toxic, polluted air when on the streets. Be it in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata or Hyderabad, everyone is forced to become experts in a complicated scientific question to cope with the pollution: Do pollution masks work? I’ve heard doubts from smart, skeptical […]
Category: Masks
How do people in Beijing exercise with such bad air pollution?
I’m in Beijing right now, and I’m going to exercise today. So what can I do when the world outside my window looks like this? Would exercise do more harm than good? 1. The point where exercise becomes harmful Researchers at Cambridge analyzed studies on the benefits of exercise and the harms of […]
Protect yourself from cities with bad air pollution: A Beginner’s Guide
So you’ve arrived to a polluted city–Beijing or Bangalore, Delhi or Shanghai. What can you do to keep air pollution from trimming years off your life? When I moved to China in 2007, I wasn’t a dummy. I was a college grad, and I knew about air pollution. But I knew almost nothing about protecting […]
Do Pollution Masks Really Work?
When a billion people in China (and quite a few expats) woke up to the severe air pollution in almost every city in China, it forced a billion people to become experts in a complicated scientific question: Do masks work? Since then, I’ve given talks with hundreds of people all around China about how to protect […]
NPR got these facts about masks wrong
As wildfires were raging across the American West this summer, NPR ran a story on what people can do to protect themselves from all that air pollution. As a non-expert nerd who has dedicated years to understanding how to live under Beijing’s particulate cloud, I was eager to see what the story got right and […]
Is It True That Masks Last Just One Day?
We posted info and data on our findings on whether masks really can stop pollution. My judgment after reading up on mask tests and testing them myself is that the science is pretty well settled. Masks do work. But there are still mysteries that need answers. Perhaps the biggest mystery out there is how long […]
How much pollution do we breathe every day?
How much pollution do we actually breathe in every day? Are masks or air purifiers more benefiting to our health? Do we really need both? The answer to this comes down to how and where we are spending most of our time every day. There are two possible theories: masks might seem more effective since when […]
Surgical Masks Surprisingly Effective Against PM2.5
There’s a fantastic educational poster from Greenpeace that I’ve seen in several places (for example, here on AQIcn). It offers great advice on masks that protect us from PM2.5, soot or wildfire smoke. But then it says this: “No effect” it says. But when I read the cited articles, I saw no tests of surgical […]
Shanghai Technical Inspection Bureau Mask Tests
It’s tough to get good mask data on a wide range of consumer masks. I’ve posted some of my own test data and test data from Dr. Saint Cyr. But another great source of even more mask tests comes from the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision. I’ve linked to their tests several times, but […]
Do pollution masks work?
When a billion people in China (and quite a few expats) woke up to the severe air pollution in almost every city in China, it forced a billion people to become experts in a complicated scientific question. Do pollution masks work? Since then, I’ve given talks with hundreds of people all around China about how […]