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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2415 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for June 7, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

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  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I haven't ever looked at studies on n95 masks as applied to smoke, because when I put the mask on I can't smell the smoke anymore and that's good enough for me (i know that sometimes something can mask a smell without physically removing the gas/particles but can tell that's not happening here).

This is like 4 minutes of effort, I probably should do more, but https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-020-00267-4

Surgical masks and respirators can provide limited protection for children during wildfire events, with expected decreases of roughly 20% and 80% for surgical masks and N95 respirators, respectively

]. In 2007, 30 half-facepiece masks were tested and the protection was further improved, with 95% of people having <30% of the exposure when wearing any of the respirators in the class [96]. While this amount of protection is likely inadequate for a worker who anticipates high lifetime exposure, in a situation where the general public is trying to temporarily reduce ambient exposure, such as with wildfire smoke, a 66–70% reduction in exposure for nearly everyone may be meaningful. In fact, in a general population cohort of non-fit-tested healthy adults, a crossover study in China found that there was less increase in airway inflammation (measured with exhaled nitric oxide) associated with air pollutant exposure when a study participant wore an N95, compared to wearing a sham N95 mask [103].

Note that 95% <30% doesn't mean the median is 30%, the median would be significantly less than 30%.

And you can (try to) notice when the fit is wrong and letting too much outside air in and adjust it yourself.

Sure, but you're taking an already small exposure (a week or so of smoky air) and reducing it by ~70% or whatever. It kind of reminds me of those "eating bacon increases the risk of <obscure cancer with .01% lifetime risk> by 30%.

That and I'm deeply suspicious of the public health effort to make stuff that was just a part of life 20 years ago into some big hairy deal -- thus my advice to crack a beer and not worry so much.

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