According to Christine Rogers in Environmental Science and Engineering at Harvard, my asthma is due to global warming. I'm so comforted by this. I'd always believed that so many of us had developed allergies and asthma due to the habit of keeping us alive when we should have died as preemie or sickly, infected infants, or as weak toddlers. If we had, indeed, died from less effective medical treatments -- as our more sensible preceeding generations had, with their astonishingly high infant mortality rates -- then we wouldn't be unreasonably fecund adults, and we and our offspring wouldn't be suffering from constricted airways caused by pollen and mold spores generated by increased warmth, today.
Of course, we have many more environmental trigers, today, too, such as modern polymers and cleaners which didn't exist before my granddaughter was born, let alone before the scientists discovered the temperature of the atmosphere was a half a degree warmer, all around, than it was when my grandfather was born. It couldn't be that we're sensitized, due to, say, carpet glue and Formula 409, and that makes us more likely to react to ragweed and black mold.
It couldn't be because our bodies were designed to fight all manner of problems, and we have eliminated the most common bacterial enemies in our home environments, so our immune systems became paranoid & started reacting to friendly stuff as though it were al Qaeda attending a wedding uninvited.
I must curse that global warming for making my miserable life that much more miserable. Oh -- and I blame modern technology for keeping me alive to suffer through it. All of those who are making this prolonged respiratory distress possible -- don't let the tree-huggers stop you. I prefer this to the alternative.
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