Se-ho LEE/How the fine dust affects/Tuesday 5-6

How the fine dust affects

 

Seriousness of fine dust is making headlines these days. Fine dust also known as PM-10 is the air blowing from the south Asia to Korea on the westerly wind and contains heavy metals and other harmful ingredients because many country of middle Asia mainly depend on fossil fuel. It causes many problems in our society at large.

 

Fine dust reduces production rate of farms. Plant photosynthesizes to reach full growth but fine dust blocks sunlight making some crops infructuous and containing less nutrients. Live stocks are affected from it because they live mainly on grass. Fine dust is also not good at their health because harmful and fine particles pass through their body and causes many diseases. There are some research results that fine dust promotes infectious diseases like FMD (Foot-and-Mouth Disease).

 

Fine dust also affects our industries. Industries making food or pharmaceuticals are put stress on cleanliness but dusts getting into factory make product useless and in unfortunate case, company should recall their products already in the market. Factories making semiconductor or display for home appliances are no exception. These kinds of products demand very precise manufacturing process so a particle of dust can cause defective goods finally ending up with recall and damage to their profits. Factories using precision machine to manufacture product are hard put to it in same reason.

 

The most important thing is that fine dust badly affects human body. Fine particles pass into our respiratory organ and cause disease like rhinitis, asthma. Particularly heavy metal component of dust can trigger lung cancer. Dust also arouses our pores of skin and causes hair loss and atopic dermatitis. If our body is exposed to fine dust long time, the possibility of stroke is increased because fine dust could block vessels. What is worse, embryo in their mother's womb could be affected with diseases like polio because of fine dust.

 

The intensity of fine dust is now stronger and the cycle length of its appearing gets shorter. The government laid out some present improvement plans but there is no sign of getting better. So it is important to protect ourselves by not exposed to fine dust by checking level of it through weather forecast. Also long-term measures should be taken at the government level.