Scientists link higher dementia risk to living near heavy traffic

As glenn1 mentioned - lead has to be one of the brain killers of the industrial world (plenty of research on) and just for laughs check out that wonder agent "Benzene".

In my city people still grow rice & vegies on fields at major intersections. They think they're eating / selling home grown stuff. Homegrown - yes! But .....!

One of the worst pollutants near roadways used to be lead, but it has been banned from fuel over here since the mid 1990s. Studies done back then showed that most of the lead fell out of the air within a few hundred meters of the roads.

Another pollutant worth considering near roadways would be rubber. When tires wear out, it is because they leave residue on the roads and in the air. Rubber in the lungs and in the blood is probably not good for health.

When I see pictures of the amazingly horrible air pollution in some Chinese cities, I can't help but wonder what it is doing to the health of the people who live there. Furthermore, there have been studies published in Scientific American magazine showing photos from Earth orbit of smog clouds going all around the northern hemisphere, from China to North America, then to Europe, and then all the way back to Asia.

We here in the States are partially to blame for China's pollution, in that we sent our worst polluting industries to them in order to save money. Not having to worry about what happens when one kills people with your pollution lowers manufacturing costs significantly.

BertieWoosterJAN. 07, 2017 - 08:18AM JST Why do they call people who come up with unmitigated rubbish like this scientists?

Because the scientific process is to propose a hypothesis and then conduct an experiment to test the hypothesis through controlled conditions - exactly like Copes and his team did. If you object to their outcome, the proper response is to identify flaws in their experimental methodology, show how their results cannot be replicated by other studies, or conduct a better-designed experiment of your own to contest their results.

Calling it rubbish and questioning if they're scientists no doubt feels good personally, but it's not an effective contribution to the process.

Bertie - why is it unmitigated rubbish?

Usually Lancet medical journal reports these days are more than scrupulously scrutinized (after a couple of questionables got thru), so one would expect a reasonable amount of investigative authenticity to the article.

And it's a study report - not a Law.

The smoking gun nobody is considering is the sewage sludge biosolids containing infectious prions from the excrement of all those suffering dementia that are trucked for storage and spreading on farms as fertilizer. Research has found breathing such prions is thousands of times more infectious than eating them, as happened with the spread of CJD from Mad Cow. And researchers recently discovered poultry in the USA have bacteria resistant to antibiotics by sampling the air behind trucks carrying the poultry. So people adjacent to trucking routes for city sewage sludge biosolids are likely at greatest risk of breathing dementia causing prions from the contaminated sewage loads. This begs further investigation, but likely won't happen because governments at all levels are committed to spreading city sewage on farmland as the cheapest and easiest way of getting rid of it!

Why do they call people who come up with unmitigated rubbish like this scientists?