So using data from the US Embassy's twitter feed and this New England Journal of Medicine article on air pollution, which I completely did not understand, I have tried to do an analysis of whether the Beijing air is killing me or is just packed full of flavor. According to the journal article prolonged exposure to air pollution is not good for you and they tried to quantify how much it takes off your life. Like I said, I didn't completely understand the conclusion they made so I am going to complete distort everything they wrote to make my point. So based on this section (which was towards the end of the article so assumed it was something like a conclusion):
"Improvements in life expectancy during the 1980s and 1990s were associated with reductions in fine-particulate pollution across the study areas, even after adjustment for various socioeconomic, demographic, and proxy variables for prevalence of smoking that are associated with health through a range of mechanisms. Indirect calculations point to an approximate loss of 0.7 to 1.6 years of life expectancy that can be attributed to long-term exposure to fine-particulate matter at a concentration of 10 μg per cubic meter, with the use of life tables from the Netherlands and the United States and risk estimates from the prospective cohort studies. In the present analysis, a decrease of 10 μg per cubic meter in the fine-particulate concentration was associated with an estimated increase in life expectancy of approximately 0.61±0.20 year — an estimate that is nearly as large as these indirect estimates."
I have decide that one year will be considered a prolonged period of air pollution exposure (you are thinking but where does it say that, nowhere, I decided myself) and I will use the numbers 0.7 and l.6 to average the amount of life that I lose per 10 μg per cubic meter increase of air pollution, and I will use 0.61 to calculate the life I gain by a 10 μg per cubic meter decrease of air pollution. Here is a link to the google document where I did the calculations.
After several days of trying to figure out how to gather the data and then put it in a format that I could use in excel, I have concluded, based on the tab named "Daily Avg. Midnight", that I have lost 18.18 hours of life, while living in Beijing from 8/1/2010 to 2/6/2011. I have assumed of course that there is a linear relationship in terms of the amount of life I gain and lose per every cubic meter of air pollution over 10 μg, which is probably not true, but it is also probably close enough (reasoning based on nothing at all). Why did I choose to use the "Daily Avg. Midnight data," one it seemed the easiest to use at the time and two it is the most dramatic, the other tabs don't say I am dying enough, so I don't believe them, and I am pretty sure that all that flavor country in the Beijing air has some harmful effects.
I wish I had a longer time series of data, so if you work at the US embassy or know how to extract more data from the twitter feed, please send me the data. I would like to know if I have taken more years off my life than that. I assume probably.
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