Air Pollution and Its Effects on the Immune System

At this point, we all know that air pollution has a damaging influence on human health and can impact a variety of systems in the body. But how does it affect your immunity? Let’s look at the air pollution and its effects on the immune system.

Table of Contents

• Air pollution and immune system importance
• Air pollution and immune system damage
• Protect your immune system

Air pollution and immune system importance

The immune system protects your body from bacteria, viruses, toxins, and fungi and helps it fight infections and other diseases. It’s easy to see how crucial it is to the overall health of every person. Unfortunately, long exposure to smog and air pollution can significantly weaken it and cause your body to stop dealing with the infections the way it used to. But how does it exactly happen?

The immune system has various immune cells, but air pollution disrupts their functioning. It mostly targets such cells as inflammatory neutrophils, particle-clearing macrophages, and lymphocytes. Smog also aggravates dendritic cells, which are responsible for orchestrating adaptive immune responses. On top of that, polluted air worsens Th2 and Th17 (T helper lymphocyte types) adaptive immune responses responsible for allergies and asthma.

Air pollution and immune system damage

When you breathe polluted air, your cardio-respiratory system senses it’s dangerous to the body and releases white blood cells, which should help with the infection. However, long-term exposure to air pollution leads to high counts of white blood cells, which means that inflammation appears. Chronic or prolonged inflammation is especially dangerous as it can lead your body to start attacking healthy cells, tissues, and organs. The longer the inflammation lasts, the worse. 

Of course, with weakened immunity, your body is much more susceptible to infections that can affect almost every other system, including respiratory, circulatory, digestive, reproductive, and neurological.

Protect your immune system

How to fight air pollution and its effects on the immune system? Through clean air, of course! In the long run, you should support any initiatives that aim to improve air quality and reduce the number of pollutants. But in the meantime, you can protect yourself by monitoring the air quality in your area and avoiding walking out when the results are very bad or, at least, wearing the antismog mask. Indoors, where air can be even more polluted, you can use air purifiers.

This may also interest you: how to improve indoor air quality in office.