AIR  IN  DANGER

_______

_____

                                                 

In  Memoriam

To  Haroun Tazieff

 

 

 who realized too late that

 frequentation of the air-conditioned hotels

 is much more dangerous

 than that of all the craters

 volcanoes of planet ! 

 

 Although frequentation of the physicists

 is surely hardly more resting,

 he made me the honour re-examine

 the manuscript of this work,

 thus bringing to me the fruits

 of a solid experiment,

 and of a teaching talent

 whose experts know the price .

 

 May he find the insurance here

 of my gratitude and my attachment

 with our common combat. 

 May he find  there too

 feelings of friendship and regard

 for the man whose courage never failed. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PREFACE OF

HAROUN TAZIEFF

  

 

 I have the chance to be a species of tower of health.    However, at the moment, I come back from Japan, from where I bring back  an influenza harmful like all, collected on the foot of the  Unzen volcano, which we had gone to study.   But the eruption  does not have nothing to do with this business:  the influenza, which  destroyed me during ten days, I collected it in an air conditioned  hotel...  A hotel with American - Japan, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki,  aligned itself on the United States - hotel of glass and steel built  on the site of the one of these traditional thermal baths, called over  there o-furo, which strews this volcanic archipelago, hot water that  all the population uses in an intense way and who are perhaps one of  the reasons why Japanese are also solid.   Therefore at least were it  before the era of the air conditioning

 Many are the people, doctors included, who for a long time  realized that the " air-conditioned " air seemed in the beginning many  colds, migraines, bronchi tides, influenzas, allergies.    Everyone, or almost - and myself when I took this evil with Kyu-Shu at  this beginning of August 1991 - believed that these diseases came from  the cold in which, coming from an outside hot and wet, one was  brutally plunged.  

   As which was not my surprise while reading in this  book of Jacques Breton as the air conditioning was well, as much think  it already, a harmful effect of great scale but not at all because of the  differences in temperature:  because of the particles microscopic,  even ultramicroscopic, in suspension in any inhabited room.    Some of these micropolluants are, by their nature even, aggressive,  but those which could not have been it, are it because they transport  pathogenic germs, virus, bacteria, moulds, etc

 The air pollution is a thing which I know  somewhat:  since, vulcanologist beginning, I understood that the gases  were, alone, the active element of the eruptions (and not lava which,  for sumptuous that they are, are never but one entirely passive  component) and that I consequently devoted the essence of my efforts  to their study.  

I thus did not fall, by reading the Air in Danger,  in a completely unknown field of me.   The more so  as, as a departmental elected official, occupying me since a  half-dozen of years of the questions raised by pollution in general -  that of water, that of the grounds, but also that of the air - this  micropollution is essential me as much as the macro pollution by  particles larger than... microns, this micropollution that the modern  society increasingly frightening product bulk.   And not only  industries but from now on each citizen:  we all are pollutants 

 I thus knew various things, more certainly that the average  citizen about the micropollution, but the book of Jacques Breton  taught me much from it that I was unaware of.   And above all,  the pathogenic role of these micro particles and the major harmful  effect that which is the " conditioning ", unceasingly, brews an air  upon the departure vitiated by the positively charged particles which  it carries, and becomes it more as it passes and passes by again by a  humanity of which it collects not only the carbon dioxide produced by  breathing, like all sweat, but also the germs which it carries in  it or on it. 

I learned the role from the positive ions and the negative  ions, the generally harmful first, the second beneficial ones:  this  role, I was unaware of it completely.  Breton, as a physicist,  explains us in a very clear way it why and it how of this action,  action negative of the positive ions, positive action of the negative ions  !  This paradox is of a nature only semantic and, by reading  Jacques Breton, you will understand that without sorrow no,  even if you do not have any knowledge in these matters.   It  popularises excellent way indeed.   It popularises like only,  when they want to do it, the researchers can it.   Because the  only good " popularisation " of the science which that is to  say can be the work only of the researcher himself, because  only knows to him perfectly what it speaks.   Better than  whoever.   Even most learned of the professors - a fortiori of  the journalists, including those which are said " scientific ", cannot  claim to control subjects which they do not know, at best, which with  second hand, through original articles written by the researchers, but  generally of third or fourth hand, by articles of popularisation,  treaties or handbooks. 

Another revelation of importance that Jacques Breton brings to us in  this book, it is it why role, harmful for health, much more harmful  than one thinks it, of the screens of television set, computer,  minitel or text processing:  always positive ions. 

 These warnings, and these scientifically rational explanations  constitute a contribution which I estimate of first order at our  knowledge of the dangers which surround us.   But there is one  " more " major importance:  the discovery of the parade and how to  protect itself:  Breton Jacques, indeed, found the means at the same  time of preventing and of curing the effects of the harmful effects  generated by the particles with positive electric charge.   He  invented and developed an instrument of a simplicity which astounds me  and which, in two seconds, replaces in the part where one starts it  these harmful effects electropositive by the well-being which the negative oxygen  ions   get.   Hundreds of million people all over  the world will be able from now on to go well who, up to now, went  badly.