26 June

We’ve accepted dirty air our whole lives, in a way we’d absolutely refuse to accept dirty water. Now venture capital, including the maligned AI companies, has put forward $500 million to help fix this obvious threat, targeting even the colds and flus we’ve grown up being told are just a normal part of life. They’re absolutely unnecessary. Here are some stats. - healthy people spend 5% of their lives sick with respiratory infections - there are nearly 13 billion respiratory infections every year, globally - at least 7% of deaths are caused directly by these infections - the chronic long-term impacts are huge, a much higher risk for heart disease, neurological diseases like dementia, schizophrenia, and asthma - the world economy loses about $600 billion annually to respiratory infections. It needs to be pointed out this is work ordinary public health should be doing, except politicians and social media culture destroyed it during Covid. That fatuous ‘lives and livelihoods’ propaganda we all heard, implying we couldn’t be both healthy and functional, at the same time. Public health was invented to reject that entire distinction.