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recently published study by researchers at Columbia University in New York has discovered a definitive link between air pollution inhaled by pregnant women and lower IQ scores of their offspring. Published in the medical journal Pediatrics, the study tested 249 New York City women who lived in neighborhoods with high levels of air pollution. They study showed that kids whose mothers breathed in the most pollutants scored four to five IQ points lower on average.

These researchers were able to detect a perceptible drop in IQ test scores from New York's level of air pollution which is nowhere near the suffocating particulate-laden air found in Metro Manila and major cities in the Philippines. So the question now is; what about the legions of young Filipino children who have been breathing-in this highly polluted air every day of their lives? And how will it affect them and their future? One can only guess at how much damage has already been done. For indigent kids, its a double-whammy as they also do not get the proper amount of daily nutrients required for their healthy growth.

The culprits are obvious and everywhere. In the Philippines Diesel is cheaper than unleaded gasoline. However, the old surplus diesel engines discarded by Korea and Japan and used in Philippine jeepneys and buses pollute a lot more than their newer, technically-superior counterparts. If you add the cost of air-pollution related illnesses as well as the cost of cleaning up the grime that permeates the metropolis, diesel fuel would cost a lot more than unleaded gasoline.

Culprit number two is the two-stroke tricycle engine. Just one of these tricycles pollute as much as 50 cars—which is one reason why two-stroke motor vehicles  are banned in many cities around the world. In the Philippines however, these tricycles abound contributing to a pollution level in metropolitan areas that can be immediately nauseating to a person used to the cleaner air of developed countries.

 Inside this noxious cloud of fumes and particulates are children, and students, commuters, and ordinary working folk whose brain cells are slowly but surely being affected by the caustic environment that is all around them and from which there is no running away from.

They are also tomorrow's Filipinos whose burden it will be to move the country forward and complete in an increasingly globalized and highly technical world. Jose Rizal called them "the hope of the fatherland" yet they might someday see themselves as forsaken by their predecessors (and that includes us) who were unwilling to take the necessary steps and make the needed sacrifices so that they—at the very least—would have a fighting chance. The popular saying 'you reap what you sow' does not hold true in this particular context because it is our children who will reap what we sow today. And so far we have done pathetically little for them and instead are inexorably handicapping them by forcing them to breath in all that toxic air each and every day of their lives.

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