Key Points
- Improving indoor air quality can help people live healthier lives
- Exposure to past and present air pollutants can have a measurable impact on overall life expectancy
- Ventilation is a key component of extending life expectancy, according to experts
Reducing the DALY Tally Through IAQ Improvements
Nick Agopian, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at RenewAire, and Paul Raymer, Chief Investigator from Heyoka Indoor Solutions LLC, joined Tyler Kern for the final installment of their focus on improving indoor air quality (IAQ). This episode focussed on how improving IAQ can have an impact on disability-adjusted life years (DALYs).
“You want to live a healthy life up until the last moment,” Raymer said. “DALYs are a way of evaluating diseases in populations that impact the healthy life of people. If your life expectancy is 100 years, but your final years are in a wheelchair, those are disability-affected life years.”
Impacts of DALY and IAQ
There are many issues proven to affect people’s health from poor IAQ. The European Union (EU) estimates that air pollutants contribute to a host of disorders that equal more than 2 million DALY years. The EU is not alone in this research either. Experts contend that the cumulative effects of poor IAQ will lower life expectations. Clearly, overall health should be taken very seriously.
Indoor air quality impacts not only health and wellness, but also cognition and productivity. Eating healthier diets and exercising are often steps people take to extend their life, but IAQ may play an even more vital role. For instance, cardiovascular diseases, lung cancer, asthma, COPD, upper and lower respiratory infections are illnesses that are linked to poor ventilation. Researchers at Berkley Lab even found that poor ventilation hurts learning and test-taking, claiming SAT test scores rose by 18% with better IAQ in schools.
Conclusion
It’s clear that air quality should be considered a key factor in a holistic health approach. And unlike the other health trends, ventilation will save you money after a certain amount of time. For Agopian, he believes wholly that “ventilation is life and … a no brainer.”
