Time to clear the air

Two major studies highlight fatal hazards of air pollution

Home is where the heart disease is. And the impaired lung function.
Two new and extensive studies, published in eminent medical journals, have highlighted the immense health risks faced by women and children living in areas of high traffic density or in close proximity to industrial plant and coal-fired power stations.
The Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study, one of the largest ever studies of its kind, was published on 1 February in the New England Journal of Medicine.
It found that women exposed to exhaust fumes and carbon-emitting industry were more likely to die of heart disease or strokes than those living in areas with cleaner air.
Make that much more likely.
Women in Los Angeles, for example, experienced a 76 per cent greater risk than women living in the less polluted Honolulu or Tucson, Arizona.
The study’s authors were shocked by the scale of the risk, it being much higher than previously thought.
The problem lies in the tiny soot particles emitted by vehicle exhausts and other hazards.
These are invisible to the naked eye but form the haze often seen over very polluted cities.
“These soot particles, which are typically created by fossil fuel combustion in vehicles and power plants, can contain a mix of chemicals,” says Joel Kaufman, professor of environment and occupational health sciences, epidemiology and medicine at Washington University, and leader of  the study.
“The tiny particles - and the pollutant gases that travel along with them - cause harmful effects once they are breathed in.”
Women are generally less susceptible to heart disease than men, but when they develop it, are two times more likely to die, due to women having smaller coronary arteries.
The study authors pointed out that their findings were consistent regardless of the women’s weight, smoking history, blood pressure or cholesterol levels, and called for legislation to tackle pollution of the kind cited in the study, through much tighter controls.
The study was conducted over 9 years, involving 65,000 women across the US.
A British Heart Foundation spokesperson said the findings were “robust” and that this was not the first large-scale study to link air pollution with heart disease.
“(This study) suggests the risk is greater than we had thought.
“This adds to the mounting evidence that air pollution should be taken seriously as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease.”
The BHF’s advice to anyone with chronic lung disease or heart disease is, during days of high pollution, to stay indoors.
As the spokesperson said, the evidence is mounting, and linking pollution not only to heart disease.
A study due to be published in The Lancet on 17 February finds that children living near busy roads, as well as being at greater risk of developing asthma and other respiratory diseases, are extremely vulnerable to impaired lung development.
The study, by the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, found that children living within 500 metres (around a third of a mile) of a motorway since the age of 10 were much more likely to have substantial defects in lung function by the time they were 18 than children living 1500 metres (1 mile) or more from a motorway.
These lung function defects, manifesting in a reduced capacity to inhale and exhale air,  last a lifetime.
“Someone suffering a pollution-related defect in lung function as a child will probably have less than healthy lungs all his or her life,” comments W James Gauderon PhD, associate professor of preventative medicine at the Keck School of Medicine and the report’s chief author.
He continues: “(P)oor lung function in later life is known to be a major risk factor for respiratory or cardiovascular diseases.”
The study was conducted over 8 years, involving 3600 children in 12 Southern California communities.
“Otherwise healthy children, who were non-asthmatic and non-smokers also experienced a significant decrease in lung function from traffic pollution,”
Mr Gauderer adds, “This suggests that all children, not just susceptible subgroups, are potentially affected by traffic exposure.”
He called for planners to ensure that schools are built as far away from busy motorways as possible.
Advice our city planners would do well to take.
The Scottish Socialist Party’s call for Free Public Transport would go a long way to reducing our car usage as experience shows - for example in Hasselt, Belgium, which operates a similar system - that when people are offered a comprehensive transport system that costs nothing, they will happily leave their cars at home.
If such a system were in place, the government, instead of following the old ‘predict and provide’ model which sees our motorway capacity expanding continually, and more and more cars coming along to utilise that capacity, we could actually start to reduce our road-building, freeing up space for people to live and breathe in.

Planet-friendly war?

The big problem with war, of course, is that it’s just so damn well environmentally unfriendly.
Thank goodness then that those clever chaps at BAE Systems have come up with the idea of a new generation of deadly munitions that, while really rather unkind to people, are at least kind to the planet.
Bullets will now have reduced lead content because, according to their website, “lead used in ammunition can harm the environment and pose a risk to people.”
And the people of Basra can look forward to the day when the British armoured vehicles that pound through their streets have lower carbon emissions.
Those brainy gun-manufacturing boffins are also toying with the idea of non-toxic weaponry, shells that don’t blow up just because someone sneezes in the next room, and turning waste explosives into manure.
It is, as a spokeperson for the Campaign Against the Arms Trade noted, “laughable”.
Sure, noone wants bombs like DU-tipped shells that poison generations of people and make the land uninhabitable, and yes, it would be excellent if soldiers used bullets that didn’t pose a risk to people, but the idea that war is inevitable and therefore we might as well make the best of it, is a right-wing myth.
Want to save the earth?
Stop making war.

Seeking asylum

People seeking asylum have come to Scotland fleeing torture, rape, persecution and murderous regimes in their countries of birth, hoping for a new safer life for them and their families.
However rather than the peace and security they seek, they face further torment at the hands of the UK government.
They are refused the right to work, denied benefits and forced to live in poverty. Worrying that every day might be the day that a Home Office goon squad kicks in their door and drags them off to be imprisoned or deported.
Jo Harvie and Roz Paterson spoke to people seeking asylum in Glasgow about their experiences and the pressures they face.
The Voice would like to thank all at the Unity Centre for their help.

Elham
When Elham first came to Britain, she didn’t know what sort of a place she had come to.
“But I felt just so happy to have saved my life, and that the dark life had passed.”
Since then, it seems the dark life has swamped her again, as she struggles to make ends meet on her tiny benefits allowance, and to keep her hope of settling here alive.
She arrived, 19 years old, at Dover in December 2000, before being dispatched to Glasgow as part of the government’s dispersal programme.
All seemed well until her application for asylum was refused. This pitched her into despair and she made a series of bad decisions, including to follow her boyfriend to Oxford, thereby giving up the flat the Refugee Council had secured for her.
“It was stupid, very wrong. They wanted an address for me, and to know if I was happy. And I wasn’t, no. But I stayed in Oxford three years until my boyfriend sent me away, because he had a new girlfriend.”
This would be bad enough for any vulnerable young woman, but for one who had nowhere else to go, it was a catastrophe.
“My church were no help. They said I should never have had a boyfriend in the first place.”
As Oxford was now such a painful place for her, Elham returned to Glasgow, where she scrabbled to find work. But nothing she found was enough to keep a roof over her head, and she had to keep moving.
“I had permission to work, but I just had a paper and many employers don’t accept it. They want the proper ARC card instead. The Home Office have promised me one, but I didn’t have it then.”
She worked in a bar, but then had her hours cut back so much she couldn’t afford to live.
Then she found work in a factory - having pleaded for a job, in tears - but was bullied by her supervisor, apparently for embarking on a relationship with a fellow worker and, latterly, becoming pregnant.
Had she had a secure tenancy, and a possibility of alternative employment, she could have walked. As it was, she was stuck.
“I worked so hard for (the supervisor)! I did so much more work than anyone else, but she found fault all the time,” she says, her voice rattling with emotion at the memory. “But she was so angry with me! And I was so scared, because if she sacked me, I had nowhere else to go!”
Elham lost her baby, but she was granted a flat and is now studying for an HNC in accounting at a local college.
“I really like it!” she enthuses, sounding so much brighter.
But life remains very tough. She receives £35 a week benefits, granted in vouchers, and £8 in cash, from a charity.
“I have to be careful, very careful, with money. If I go to see my boyfriend on a Sunday, my bus fares cost £8, so that’s all my cash for a week. I can’t even buy second-hand clothes, only what is available in the one shop where I can spend my vouchers.”
Meantime, her case hangs heavy on her mind. Having been refused once, she is very afraid of being refused again.
Her Christian faith is a problem for her at home in Iran. But there’s more to it than that.
“I didn’t tell the Home Office, when I first came, about the rapes (at the hands of authority figures, including in prison). I was scared to talk about it. I didn’t tell anyone, only my mother knew. In Iran, they don’t care about it. Now I think they (the Home Office interviewers) will think, ‘Why didn’t she say it the first time? How can we believe her?’
“It would be very dangerous for me to go back. I worry all the time, I have such a pain in my chest with it that the doctor prescribed me tablets.
“I used to drink just to get to sleep and forget about it, but now I’m trying hard not to do that. But every night, when I go to bed, I lie there thinking, are they going to send me back? Are they?”

Magloire
“I don’t think John Reid realises the torture he’s giving us. We are here in this country three, four, five years, and after that he is asking us to leave...
“We were tortured before, in the countries we came from. But that was physical. The torture in the UK is mental.”
Magloire arrived in London from Burkina Faso in 2002, in time to give birth to her daughter in March 2003, she thought in safety. Mum and baby were moved to Glasgow a couple of months later.
The life they’ve lived since is one of broken sleep, fear and depression, as still their precarious situation is not resolved. Every day Magloire gets up expecting Home Office security staff to seize her at any point, she never feels safe.
“When I have to go to report (at Brand Street immigration centre, where she has to turn up weekly) I don’t sleep for the whole night before.”
While public outcry and community action to stop dawn raids seems to have reduced the regularity of this brutal practice at the moment, whole families are still detained when they attend to sign at Brand Street.
Magloire knows what detention is like. She spent three and a half months in the notorious Yarls Wood immigration prison with her child. In that time they were taken to the airport on five separate occasions to be deported to Burkina Faso - where Magloire was born, but a country she has not set foot in since the age of nine. She was sold into slavery as a
child.
Her protests saved her from deportation, but also left her bruised and battered. Assaulted by security staff in front of her daughter, she says her little girl still remembers it.
It was worse than prison, she says. “In prison, at least you know how long you are there for. In detention, you know you didn’t do anything wrong, and you don’t know how long you will be held there. I don’t understand how I managed.”
She smiles broadly when she talks about her release, the campaign to free her showing her everything she needed to know about the people of Glasgow.
“It was the people who freed me, the Glasgow Campaign to Welcome Refugees had demonstrations all the time about me... The day I came out, there was a big meeting, and many newspaper reporters were there. I felt like a hero!
“I knew I was not alone, that I’ve got a family. My family is in Glasgow and I will stay in Glasgow.
Magloire’s friends and neighbours have stood together to provide the warmth and safety she craves for herself and her wee girl, that she’s entitled to as a human being. All she needs now is for this government to stop threatening to take it all away.

Evariste
Evariste is beaming as he shows off the picture of his daughters. He’s like any proud dad except, a little unusually, in the picture his girls are protesting to have their dad released from Dungavel detention centre.
Evariste’s story should have ended happily in September 2005, when he was reunited with his family in Glasgow. They had been separated as they fled Democratic Republic of Congo. But a catalogue of catastrophic mistakes and pitiless bureaucracy has put their happy ending in tremendous jeopardy.
When he washed up in France, he didn’t know his wife and three children were safe in Glasgow. But they tracked each other down, and he arrived at Prestwick airport to be greeted by the family he hadn’t seen for years.
There was a tinge of sadness - “The kids didn’t recognise me at first,” he says, “they were very little” when he’d been separated from them. But soon they were settled together at home.
Then the problems started, caused by the fact that Evariste had begun claiming asylum in France - and the UK immigration system rules say that’s where he should stay.
A few months after finding each other, the Home Office sent a letter saying the whole family must return to France. Evariste’s wife and children had never been there - it was a totally unlawful demand.
In March 2006, they sent another letter with their new decision - Evariste must go back to France himself.
In summer last year, when he reported at Brand St, he was detained to be taken to Dungavel. His wife and daughter were outside waiting.
Staff went out to ask her for Evariste’s epilepsy medication, but would not explain what was happening. In a panic, believing he was ill, she crossed the city to home to collect his medicine. Still no-one explained what was happening.
It wasn’t until Evariste passed them at the gates in an immigration service van, on his way to the Ayrshire prison, that they realised where he was being taken and the tears started.
The report issued with instructions for Evariste’s removal to France stated that he is single and has no children - his wife had already handed in their marriage certificate but the Home Office has lost it. A form which acknowledged she handed it in saved him from immediate deportation.
Still the Home Office looked for an excuse to remove him, with outstanding callousness insisting that they could not be sure the children were his. A DNA test arranged by Evariste’s lawyer put paid to that line of prevarication.
In August he was freed from Dungavel, but the family have since then heard nothing about what’s to happen next.
A family that was separated by war, then found each other again many thousands of miles away, could yet be ripped apart again by this country’s own cold, cruel immigration system.

Alexander
“One of us has to be strong and I try to be that person, but it is very difficult. We have been waiting for four years for an answer, yes or no. And no answer ever comes. We can’t make any plans, because we don’t know what happens tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow come officers from the Home Office to take us away.”
This is Alexander, who fled Ukraine over five years ago, along with his wife and son. They live an isolated, anxious life, with barely enough money to live on and a deeply uncertain future.
“We came to Glasgow in 2002 and, a year later, were taken to Dungavel. The Home Office men came at six in the morning, they just came into the flat, grabbed us and took us away.”
This horrendous experience has left its mark.
“Even now, if there’s something happening outside in the early morning, with the neighbours, or some children, my wife and son are very frightened.”
They stayed in Dungavel for three weeks. Because Alexander’s son is so young, they were able to stay together as a family unit, but other than that, all conditions matched those of a prison.
“We met a women there who had two sons. One was 13 and so he was allowed to stay with her. The other was 18, and he was taken to another building. But we were together.
“It was like a jail. The staff count you in at night and count you again early in the morning. Whether you are asleep or awake, they knock very loudly on your door and if you don’t answer, they come in.
“You’re not allowed outside when you want, only for two hours in 24, and even then, you must not cross the yellow line or you get into trouble.
“It’s difficult for adults, but it’s disastrous for children.”
Schooling appeared rudimentary and there was little else to take his son’s mind off the fact that his family were helpless, trapped in the British immigration system with nowhere to go.
“My son’s teacher visited us and she was very frightened because the staff took her fingerprints. It’s unbelievable, she said. They don’t do this even in a normal jail. Rosie Kane, when she came to see us, she said this too. She said it is easier to visit people in jail than in Dungavel.”
Rosie was instrumental in releasing them from Dungavel, providing bail and securing an address for them. As they had an ongoing case, the judge agreed to let them out.
Two months later, they were returned to the flat they had been living in before
“Since then? There’s nothing wrong with life in Glasgow, but (in our situation) you just can’t feel like a normal person. You get very easily upset and angry. You get benefits, and it’s enough for food and nothing more. You can’t do anything.”
Life is on hold for this family. Alexander, a truck driver by trade, and his wife, a trained accountant, are not permitted to work, which means not only can they not improve their financial situation, nor can they meet people and feel a part of wider society.
“I tried to get a driving license, but can’t without my passport, which the Home Office have. When I asked (the Home Office), they said, ‘Why do you need this? You’re not allowed to work’.
“I was hoping to do voluntary work, just for some experience here as a driver, but I can’t even do that. You’re on your own, and no one wants to help you.”
Their lives are monotonous. Every day is alike, with little to do other than worry. Every month, Alexander visits their solicitor, who has nothing to tell them, other than to be patient.
It is, he says, very hard for his son to have a childhood under these circumstances.
“It’s good that he goes to school. He’s busy till 4pm every day, and has football games too. He is making friends. But he and my wife see a counsellor, to help them deal with the stress. He is only 13.
“We survive, that’s all we do. We feel like animals in the zoo, stuck, not knowing what comes next.”

The Merzoukis
Laifa Merzouki is worried about his two young sons. Aged just four, and 18 months old, Yacer and Adam struggle for breath every day. They have a rare genetic condition called Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia, which affects the lungs, ears, nose and throat and results in severe congestion and infection.
Deafness is common and death in early adolescence is possible if high quality medical treatment is not received. Adam’s hearing has now reached a critical stage and it is almost certain that he will  lose it completely in the next few years.
Both boys need specialist physiotherapy three times a day and need to attend hospital every few weeks. They are often unwell and require aggressive emergency medical treatment when infections occur.
But with specialist treatment at Yorkhill hospital, the boys are getting by. When he’s well enough, Yaser loves football, tae kwon do and gymnastics and is making good progress at nursery school.
Thing is, the care they rely on from the experts at Glasgow’s children’s hospital is not guaranteed. The Merzouki family are not just battling to cope with their sons’ condition - as their asylum case hangs in the balance, they face the possibility of deportation to Algeria, the country they fled six years ago.
“We have letters from doctors explaining their illness,” says Laifa, “and that if they do not get the special care they need, they may not survive their childhood.” Their consultant confirms that the boys’ treatment is not available in Algeria.
Laifa and his wife Zoubada, along with their daughter Imene, who is now 12 and thriving at All Saints secondary school, left conflict-torn Algeria to save their lives.
“The government is struggling to fight terrorist groups,” Laifa explains, “and people are victims on all sides.”
Laifa is a nurse, and one of the warring factions decided they required his skills. They took him at gunpoint and put him to work. He didn’t have a choice, he says, and not just because his own life was at risk, but because he sees it as his duty to help people.
“I see only injuries, people with injuries, I don’t see terrorists.”
This happened again, and then the third time they came for him, he refused. They threatened him and his family.
“I ran away to find a safe place... but we have to fly to the UK, in hope of finding peace and security, and justice.”
Yaser and Adam were both born here in Scotland, and the family longs to play a normal part in Glasgow life. Zoubada is also a qualified nurse, and Laifa has found the time to take extra qualifications and, while as an asylum seeker he is not allowed to work, he has volunteered at the ‘Build a Bridge’ health project.
“My hope is to be safe in this country, to contribute, to be a part of this country.”
For now the Home Office is refusing that simple hope - the family’s application for asylum has been rejected. The Unity centre are running a petition asking for the family to be allowed leave to remain on compassionate grounds - email the Voice for copies.
“I don’t want my children to return to Algeria, they will suffer there,” Laifa concludes. “Here they have the medical care they need to survive.
“I need support, I need people to say ‘no, they should stay here’, to fight to survive. Help my children not to suffer.”

Mariam from Burundi:
We live in worries, we have no peace just stress, even the children. We want to run away every time the door goes...
We just want to work, be normal. We are humans, we should be treated like humans.

Unity need your help

Can you provide a bail address for detainees in Dungavel?
Organisations who provide assistance for asylum seekers receive desperate calls from people in detention every day. For many languishing in Dungavel, all they need to get out is a bail address - someone who can guarantee to the court somewhere for them to stay - but there’s a shortage.
Unity are appealing for people who have a spare room to consider helping get someone out of detention.
It requires commitment, but say Unity, “Most of us who are doing this already have found the experience profoundly positive despite any difficulties.”
If you think you could help provide this real practical help to a refugee, get in touch with the Unity, and they’ll talk you through what the procedure involves.
The UNITY Centre
30 Ibrox Street
Glasgow
G51 1AQ

0141 427 7992

theunitycentre@btconnect.com