Millions Told To Monitor Shortness of Breath, Unusual Fatigue
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content.
Millions of Americans across multiple states have been advised to monitor themselves for shortness of breath and unusual fatigue amid concerns over high air pollution levels.
Ongoing air quality alerts were issued on Wednesday across large parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Texas and California, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).
The warnings mean ground-level ozone and particulate concentrations are forecast to reach dangerous levels.
Why It Matters
The NWS warned that both sensitive groups—such as children, seniors, and individuals with preexisting respiratory or heart conditions—and the general public might experience health effects linked to poor air quality in the affected regions.
In some areas, the pollution comes from drifting smoke from wildfires.
A haze of wildfire smoke blankets Detroit on Monday, August 4, 2025.
A haze of wildfire smoke blankets Detroit on Monday, August 4, 2025.
Paul Sancya/AP
What To Know
The NWS said in its alert notices: "People who may be especially sensitive to the effects of elevated levels of pollutants include the very young and those with preexisting respiratory problems such as asthma or heart disease.
"If you have heart disease: symptoms such as palpitations, shortness of breath, or unusual fatigue may indicate a serious problem. If you have any of these, contact your health care provider."
It added: "People with asthma should follow their asthma action plans and keep quick relief medicine handy."
In New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, air quality health advisories for fine particulates are in place until late Wednesday evening across large parts of the states.
Code Orange air quality alerts have been issued across large swathes of Delaware and eastern Pennsylvania. A Code Orange means that air pollution concentrations may become unhealthy for sensitive groups.
In Illinois, an Air Pollution Action Day has been issued for the greater Chicago Metropolitan Area, which means that ozone and particulate levels are expected to pose risks for sensitive groups.
Air quality advisories and alerts for fine particulates have also been issued for northern Michigan, northern and eastern Wisconsin, and far northeast Minnesota.
Meanwhile in Colorado, an air quality health advisory for wildfire smoke is in effect until 9 a.m. MT on Wednesday.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) has issued an Ozone Action Day for the Dallas-Fort Worth area for Wednesday.
In California, an air quality alert for harmful particle pollution from wildfire smoke is in effect for the San Bernardino Mountains, Angeles National Forest, San Jacinto Mountains, Coachella Valley, the Santa Rosa Reservation, and parts of the Inland Empire.
What People Are Saying
California's South Coast Air Quality Management District said in the NWS alert: "Particles in wildfire smoke can get deep into the lungs and cause serious health problems such as heart attacks, strokes, asthma attacks, and difficulty breathing. Everyone can be affected, but people with lung or heart disease, older adults, people who are pregnant, children, and those who spend a lot of time outdoors are at greater risk."
Michigan's Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy said in the alert: "Monitor for symptoms such as wheezing, coughing, chest tightness, dizziness, or burning in nose, throat, and eyes. Reduce or eliminate activities that contribute to air pollution, such as outdoor burning, and use of residential wood burning devices."
It added: "Keep windows closed overnight to prevent smoke from getting indoors and, if possible, run central air conditioning with MERV-13 or higher rated filters."
TCEQ said in the alert: "Atmospheric conditions are expected to be favorable for producing high levels of ozone air pollution in the Dallas-Fort Worth area on Wednesday. You can help prevent ozone pollution by sharing a ride, walking, riding a bicycle, taking your lunch to work, avoiding drive-through lanes, conserving energy, and keeping your vehicle properly tuned."
Jonathan Grigg, a professor of pediatric respiratory and environmental medicine at Queen Mary University of London, previously told Newsweek that there are "very clear links" between inhaling particles and earlier death from both respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.
He added: "There are vulnerable groups and classically they are children because they've got an extra issue to do with their lungs developing, whereas our lungs are not developing as adults."
What Happens Next
The majority of the air quality alerts are currently set to remain in force until late Wednesday evening.
Regular updates regarding air pollution levels are issued on the NWS website and on the Environmental Protection Agency's AirNow interactive map.
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Boston Globe
25 minutes ago
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Vox
26 minutes ago
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Untreated, it causes serious liver damage over the course of decades, leading to much higher rates of cirrhosis and liver cancer, all of which is very expensive to treat. But in the 2010s, a number of extremely effective antivirals, which randomized trials show cure upwards of 95 percent of chronic infections, came on the market. Like most new drugs, these antivirals are under patent and quite expensive; as of 2020, the cost of an eight-to-twelve week course of the drugs, usually enough to cure an infection, was between $11,500 and $17,000. Yet CBO concludes that the drugs are so effective, and the costs of treating patients with hep C who haven't been cured are so massive, that expanding treatment with these drugs reduces federal spending on hep C treatment and associated complications overall. Doubling the number of Medicaid patients getting the drugs would increase federal spending by $4 billion over 10 years. 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But (and this is me speculating, so blame me and not the CBO if I'm wrong) that effect is probably swamped by that of 'improved longevity.' Simply put: curing hep C means people live longer, which means they spend more years collecting Social Security, Medicare, and other benefits. That could mean that whatever cost savings the actual hep C treatment produces might be wiped out by the fact that the people whose lives are being saved will be cashing retirement checks for longer. I like to call it the Grim Reaper effect. The US runs a large budget deficit. It also provides far more generous benefits to seniors than to children or working-age adults. Per the Urban Institute's regular report on government spending for children, the ratio of per capita spending on senior citizens to per capita spending on children is over 5 to 1. Put together, the deficit and the elder-biased composition of federal spending implies something that is equally important and macabre: helping people live longer lives will, all else being equal, be bad for the federal budget. In an increasingly aging country, hep C is not the first place where the Grim Reaper effect has been felt, and it won't be the last. I don't have an easy fix for the situation, but it feels important to at least understand. Logan's Run economics One of the first and clearest cases of this longevity dilemma in budgeting came with cigarettes. The history of mass cigarette smoking in the US is surprisingly short. Per the CDC, American adults were only smoking 54 cigarettes annually per capita as of 1900. By 1963, that number had grown to 4,345. The development of automatic rolling machines, milder forms of tobacco, and mass marketing meant millions of working and middle-class Americans became pack-a-day smokers. But while the per capita average floated around 4,000 from the late '40s to the early '70s, it then began a precipitous decline. In 2022, the most recent year for which the Federal Trade Commission released data, Americans bought 173.5 billion cigarettes, or 667 per adult, less than a sixth of the peak, while fewer than 12 percent of American adults now smoke. Cigarettes are, of course, deadly, but they kill with a lag, usually after decades of regular smoking. That meant that in the late 1980s and 1990s, the US started to hit peak cigarette deaths, as adults who came of age during the smoking era started to get lung cancer and emphysema en masse, at numbers that less-addicted subsequent generations wouldn't match. The male death rate from lung cancer peaked in 1990, and the female death rate peaked in 1998. A flurry of economic research at the time tried to make sense of what this meant for the federal budget. Smoking harms your health. But it also shortens your lifespan. A useful 1998 Congressional Budget Office report noted that most research found that, over their lives, smokers spend more in health care costs (including more that goes on the federal tab) than non-smokers, even accounting for their shorter lifespans. But that picture changed once you added in pensions and other non-health spending. Economists John Shoven, Jeffrey Sundberg, and John Bunker in 1989 estimated that the average male smoker saved Social Security $20,000 (about $60,000 today) in benefits not paid. The figure for women, who live longer than men on average but earn less in wages and thus in Social Security, was about half that. 'It seems likely that the Federal budget currently benefits from smoking,' two Congressional Research Service researchers concluded in 1994, when the 'benefits' of early death to Social Security and Medicare were included. Malcolm Gladwell, in a thoughtful 1990 treatment of the problem in the Washington Post, was catchier: 'Not Smoking Could be Hazardous to Pension System.' Decades later, the CBO did a fuller analysis of the budgetary consequences of smoking in the aftermath of the large cigarette tax increase President Obama signed in early 2009 and proposals for further hikes. At first blush, the revenue raised from a cigarette tax should be easy to estimate: multiply annual cigarette sales by the amount of the tax. But obviously raising the price of the good will reduce the amount people buy; one major reason for cigarette taxes, after all, is to deter smoking. The CBO used a price elasticity of -0.3, meaning that a 10 percent increase in cigarette prices reduces the number sold by 3 percent. But the 2012 report was meant to go a step or two further, according to then-director Doug Elmendorf, who explained the backstory in a recent conversation with me. 'The effects of making people healthier are good for those people, obviously, but also perhaps good for the federal budget because the federal government pays for a lot of health care. If you're healthier, you don't need so much health care.' But at the same time, 'It was clear that if people were healthier, they would live longer, and that could have budgetary costs. It wasn't obvious offhand what the balance of those effects would be.' The 2012 CBO report tried to put all these effects together: the effect of lower smoking on reducing health-care spending (including government-funded spending) due to a healthier population, the effect on Social Security and other benefit spending from resulting longer lifespans, the effect of lower smoking rates on wages, and tax revenue from those wages. (The latter is often not included in formal CBO scores, as it tips closer to 'dynamic' scoring where the effect of legislation on the overall economy is included.) Over the first 10 years after a hike in the cigarette tax, they found that having a healthier population was more of a blessing than a curse, budget-wise. The health effects of a cigarette tax hike reduced federal health spending by over $900 million over a decade, even after accounting for people living longer and claiming more years of Medicare. By contrast, retirement programs only spent $183 million more because people lived longer. Swamping all that was a $2.9 billion increase in tax revenue from a healthier population capable of working and earning more. But that's just the 10-year effect. As the decades pass, the effect of longevity would grow and grow. First, Medicare costs would start to rise, as the cost of a longer-lived population began to swamp the cost savings of that population being healthier overall. (Even people who've been healthy for a long time can run up major health spending at the end of their now longer lives.) Social Security costs would keep rising, too. Fifty years in, these costs would overwhelm the benefits, and the cigarette tax's health effects would start costing the budget, on average. The point isn't 'cigarette taxes are good' or 'cigarette taxes are bad.' The point is that even a policy that saves lives isn't necessarily a slam dunk from the hard-eyed perspective of budget policy. Recent years provided a possibly even darker example. In 2022, the Medicare Trustees pushed back the date they expected the program's Hospital Insurance Trust Fund to be depleted by two years. They had several reasons, but a major one was that Covid-19 had killed hundreds of thousands of Medicare patients prematurely. Not only that, but 'Medicare beneficiaries whose deaths were identified as related to COVID had costs that were much higher than the average Medicare beneficiary prior to the onset of the pandemic.' Put another way: Covid killed off Medicare's sickest, and most expensive, enrollees. That meant the program was left with an overall healthier population, which by itself lowered medical costs by 2.9 percent in 2021. Similarly, a paper by a team of health economists earlier this year estimated that the 1.4 million excess deaths in the US due to Covid had the net effect of boosting the Social Security trust fund to the tune of $156 billion. That represented $219 billion in benefits that no longer needed to be sent, minus $44 billion in lower payroll tax revenues and $25 billion in new benefits to surviving family members. It all reminds one of Logan's Run, in which people are killed off upon hitting age 30 lest they take up too many of society's resources. That movie is a dystopia — but as a budget proposal, it'd score very well. It's good to save lives, actually The economists and agencies doing this math are, of course, only doing their jobs. We need to know what government programs will cost over the near- and long-run. These effects on health and life and death matter to those calculations. 'Members of Congress regularly thought that we were ghoulish for talking about how, if people live longer, there'll be higher benefits for Social Security,' Elmendorf recalls. 'But it's not ghoulish. Obviously, we want to live longer and members of Congress should try to help all Americans live longer. CBO's job — an analyst's job in general — is just to be honest about the likely effects.' But the fact that increased human longevity on its own worsens the budget picture should lead to some reflection. For one thing, it suggests that sometimes we should embrace policies simply because they're the right thing to do, even if they don't pay for themselves. Recall the hepatitis C treatments that prevent expensive long-term expenses for Medicaid, but might add on new costs by extending the benefits' lifespans. It's possible that, upon taking the latter into account, expanding access to hep C drugs costs the government money on net. It's a free lunch no longer. That's not a reason not to embrace the policy, though. Lots of things the government does cost money. The military doesn't pay for itself. K–12 schools don't pay for themselves. Smithsonian Museums don't pay for themselves. That doesn't mean those aren't important functions that it makes sense to put some of our tax dollars toward. Hep C treatment, I think, fits in that list, even if it's not literally free from a budget standpoint. Congress should also allow agencies like the CBO to do more to symmetrically account for the positive budgetary effects of longevity, along with the negatives. People who live longer, after all, often earn wages in those new years of life, wages that generate income and payroll tax revenues for the federal government. Moreover, people at the end of their careers are earning more money and hence paying more taxes than young people, meaning life extension helping people in their 50s and 60s might be especially good for tax revenue. The problem is that the CBO generally considers 'how many workers paying taxes are there' to be an economic effect and only considers it in special 'dynamic' scores of legislation, in which the economic consequences of them are taken into account. Dynamic scoring has been a topic of great controversy for decades, going back at least to the Bush II administration, but the rule Congress sets for CBO on when to use dynamic scoring results in CBO applying dynamic scoring very rarely in practice. A middle ground option, though, would be something called 'population change' scoring, in which CBO considers the direct effects of a change in the population (through longer lifespans, say, or immigration) on the level of employment and tax revenue, without doing a full, more complicated dynamic score. That would make its accounting of the effects of longer lives less biased: the budgetary benefits would be counted alongside the costs. We should also consider the aspects of our budget situation that make the longevity effect a reality. One is the US's long-standing, bipartisan choice to run massive budget deficits, even during relative boom times. One arithmetic consequence of that choice is that it makes the continued existence of every American a net loss for the country's books. That's not the main reason to avoid large deficits during booms, but it's a somewhat toxic byproduct all the same. The other aspect driving this effect is the choice to invest government resources very heavily in seniors relative to other age groups. This is due in large measure to the US choice to provide universal health care for seniors but not other age groups, and due to our lack of investment in very young children and working-age adults compared to other rich nations. There is no law of nature saying the US has to weigh its priorities that way. As long as we do, the numbers will imply that it's better for the budget for people to die before they get old.
Fox News
an hour ago
- Fox News
Colorectal cancer diagnoses soar among younger adults for one key reason
Updated cancer screening guidance has reportedly caused a spike in diagnoses among younger Americans. According to two studies by the American Cancer Society (ACS), there's been a recent surge in colorectal cancer in people aged 45 to 49. ACS scientists found that after 15 years of stable colorectal cancer (CRC) trends, U.S. diagnoses of local-stage disease skyrocketed in this age group from 2019 to 2022 — including a 50% relative increase from 2021 to 2022. "It is promising news, because the uptick in cases is likely due to first-time screening in the wake of new recommendations for younger, average-risk adults to begin testing for colorectal cancer earlier," lead author Elizabeth Schafer, an associate scientist and cancer researcher at ACS, commented in a press release. In 2018, ACS lowered the recommended age for CRC screenings from 50 to 45. The United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) enforced the same guidance in 2021. In the first study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the researchers analyzed CRC diagnoses from 2004 to 2022 among adults aged 20 to 54, sorted by age, location and stage at diagnosis. Diagnoses have increased by 1.6% each year since 2004 in the 20 to 39 age group, and by more than 2% annually since 2012 in those aged 40 to 44 and 50 to 54. A 1.1% annual increase in people 45 to 49 years old accelerated to 12% per year from 2019 to 2022. The ACS confirmed the increase was driven by the detection of local-stage tumors, which increased by nearly 19% each year for colon cancer and more than 25% for rectal cancer in that timeframe. Before this period, colon cancer detection rates had been stable, and rectal cancer detection rates had been declining. Advanced-stage disease also continues to steeply increase, ACS reported, rising from 1.7% to 2.9% annually since 2004 among adults under 45 and "even more rapidly" in the past 10 years in those aged 45 to 54. These findings led to another ACS study, also published in JAMA, which found that CRC screening among U.S. adults between 45 and 49 increased by 62% from 2019 to 2023. The scientists analyzed the data of more than 50,000 individuals to compare changes in screening. They found that CRC screening, which was at 20% in 2021, jumped to 37% in 2023. Among 45- to 49-year-olds, colonoscopy screening increased by 43%, and stool-based testing increased more than five times from 2019 to 2023. Lead author Jessica Star, associate scientist at ACS in Atlanta, considers it "thrilling" to see this increase in screening among younger individuals, as it's likely linked to earlier-stage diagnoses. "However, we still have a long way to go," she said in the release. "Screening for colorectal cancer in ages 45 to 49 remains suboptimal, and has not increased equitably by both educational attainment and insurance status." Paul E. Oberstein, M.D., medical oncologist and assistant director of the Pancreatic Cancer Center at NYU Langone Perlmutter Cancer Center, said the increase in screening is "successful in detecting more cancers at an early stage where the chance of cure is very high." "This ultimately should mean that fewer people are diagnosed later in life and fewer people have advanced colon cancer," Oberstein, who was not involved in the study, told Fox News Digital. "This study reinforces the need to focus research on understanding the causes of colon cancer increases – and possible steps to reduce these cases." The rate of colon cancer in those under 45 remains "substantially lower," he noted, "so it is not clear yet if universal screening at a younger age is beneficial." Some specific patients who are younger than 45 may benefit from earlier screening, however, such as those with a family history or personal risk factors, the oncologist added. As colon cancer continues to increase in younger individuals, Oberstein recommends contacting a doctor if any concerning symptoms are noticed. Dr. Craig Eagle, chief medical officer of Guardant Health in California, added that early detection is "crucial," noting that the five-year survival rate for CRC is over 90% when the disease is caught in early stages. "[This] plummets to 13% in late stages when symptoms usually appear," Eagle, who also was not involved in the research, told Fox News Digital. "The rise in diagnoses for those in their 40s is an alarming reminder that screening must be easier and more accessible to reach the 50 million Americans who remain unscreened."
