People Urged To Join Mass Excercise

[nogutsnoapplepie]

BANGKOK, Nov 20 (TNA) – Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has urged people throughout the country to participate in a two-day mass excercise, starting from today, to honour Their Majesties the King and Queen.

In his weekly radio address, Mr. Thaksin said that the annual mass excercise, organized by the Ministry of Public Health for the third time this year, is aimed at marking the nationwide celebrations of His Majesty the King's birthday on 5 December, and of Her Majesty the Queen's 72nd birthday on 12 August.

Mr. Thaksin said the mass exercise was also aimed at encouraging people to exercise more for the sake of their good health, as it is also the wish of Their Majesties the King and Queen, who have been concerned over the health of the Thai people.

Princess Ubonrat Rajakanya, the eldest daughter of Their Majesties the King and Queen, will preside over the opening of the mass exercise today at Sanam Luang ceremonial ground in Bangkok.

In upcountry, the mass exercise will be organized simultaneously at either public parks, or provincial sport stadiums.

Participants in the mass exercise are also urged to each make a 'paper bird' which is the symbol of peace to be sent to people in the country's deep South, said Mr. Thaksin.

The Ministry of Public Health has targeted that 33 million people with the age of above six will join in the exercise.

Thailand now has 58,780 health clubs, with their members totalling nearly10 million nationwide. (TNA)--E111

[cojones]

Scientists: Short-Term Exposure to Air Pollution May Kill

By Jessica Berman

Washington

16 November 2004

Scientists have long known that air pollution is a serious health hazard that increases the risk of premature death. But a new study may come as a shock. Researchers have found that people who live in urban areas are at an increased risk of dying after being exposed to high ozone levels just one week before.

Ozone is a corrosive gas produced as a byproduct of burning fossil fuels.

Researchers studied data collected over a 14-year period in 95 U.S. cities, and they found there was a small, but significant, increase overall in the number of deaths one-week after ozone levels rose. It did not matter whether ozone levels crept up one day or all seven days during the previous week.

Study author Michelle Bell of Yale's School of Environment in New Haven, Connecticut says the data do not translate easily into numbers.

"It is hard to look at in terms of absolute numbers, in terms of how many people are dying from ozone," Michelle Bell said. " But really we can say that the higher ozone levels correspond to higher mortality and lower ozone levels correspond to lower levels of mortality."

The scope of the study conducted by Professor Bell and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University is sweeping, representing 40 percent of the U.S. population.

"This is one of the largest studies of ozone and mortality that has ever been conducted," explained Professor Bell. "There have been many different studies of ozone and human health. And there also have been some studies on ozone and mortality before our study. But most of those were been looking at a single city or a small number of cities, or combining several independently conducted results, whereas our study starts with a very large data set to look at ozone mortality on a national basis."

The United States Environmental Protection Agency is currently revising air pollution standards. Yale's Michelle Bell estimates that reducing total pollution, including exposure to ozone, by one-third would result in 4,000 fewer deaths per year.

[astral]

Ozone, O3, is also a powerful disinfectant, and is used for that effect in the London Underground system.

It is intrinscially unstable and soon degrades to pure oxygen!!