In the face of smog hazards, are air purifiers really useful?

Smog is a combination of fog and haze. Smog is common in cities. Many parts of China use fog into haze as a catastrophic weather phenomenon for early warning and forecasting, collectively known as "haze weather".

The harm of smog is well known, it may cause acute upper respiratory tract infections (colds), acute tracheal bronchitis and pneumonia, asthma attacks, induce or aggravate chronic bronchitis, etc. Children, in particular, are more susceptible to respiratory viruses. People in fog for a long time can cause tracheitis, laryngitis, pneumonia, asthma, rhinitis, ocular conjunctivitis and allergic diseases, which have a certain impact on the growth and development of young children and adolescents and physical fitness. In addition, patients with poor air quality in foggy weather and poor resistance to diabetes are more likely to have lung and tracheal infections that worsen their condition.

Can an air purifier really achieve the magical effect of filtering pm2.5? Li Xiaoqun, a researcher at the Jilin Academy of Social Sciences, held a negative attitude. He said that existing air purifiers basically do not work against PM2.5, and only the most effective ones are extremely advanced. Even if it can really be filtered out, it is only a small range, the whole house cannot be filtered out, and it cannot be listened to by the salesman, who sometimes exaggerates in order to sell things.

Experts said that ozone itself is a pollutant, and the principle of adsorption materials is the same as that of drinking water purifiers, and it is necessary to change the adsorption material frequently, otherwise it will be released again as a source of pollution. Liu Jingsheng, deputy director of the Virus Prevention and Control Institute of the Hebei Provincial Center for Disease Control, believes that consumers who buy purifiers simply for the sake of smog weather are not so much buying health as buying peace of mind. In fact, in addition to the extreme smog weather, window ventilation is still more effective than opening a machine.

(Source: Yunnan Population and Health Publicity and Education Center)