http://youtu.be/9mvYec6AnCU

If you visit American city
You will find it very pretty
Just two things of which you must beware
Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air

Pollution, pollution
They got smog and sewage and mud
Turn on your tap
And get hot and cold running crud

See the halibuts and the sturgeons
Being wiped out by detergeons
Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly
But they don't last long if they try

Pollution, pollution
You can use the latest toothpaste
And then rinse your mouth
With industrial waste

Just go out for a breath of air
And you'll be ready for Medicare
The city streets are really quite a thrill
If the hoods don't get you, the monoxide will

Pollution, pollution
Wear a gas mask and a veil
Then you can breathe
Long as you don't inhale

Lots of things there that you can drink
But stay away from the kitchen sink
The breakfast garbage that you throw in to the bay
They drink as lunch in San José

So go to the city
See the crazy people there
Like lambs to the slaughter
They're drinking the water
And breathing *cough* the air

Per-capita, we have a tiny tiny fraction of the pollution there was two hundred years ago.

I live in an area that doesn't have any pollution, anyway. (nuclear plant, low traffic, clean manufacturing jobs)

I usually only get sick maybe every other year. So to be sick twice in one year is just unusual for me is all.

Per capita is a clever statistic. Means that if you average it out over the billions we have now vs 200 years ago when the Earth's population was 1 billion, taking 123 years to double, and then just 33 years to gain another billion, and 14 years more to reach 4 billion.

My stepbrother works for a company that has to invent safe storage for nuclear waste from such plants - waste that has to be kept inviolate for 10,000 years or even 100,000 years - longer than recorded history by a factor of 2 to 20! NOBODY wants to live near where this waste is stored. So when the salt mines for this stuff runs out of space... hm. And a single ounce of waste takes POUNDS (dozens, scores - maybe hundreds) of protection.

I think I'm talking more about the human pollution caused by the graph of population - this super exponential graph as all these extra billions squirted across the surface of this planet crowd closer together, taxing the ability of the land and air to support the organism. We already are cheating - forcing gasses into the soils to fertilize them (as opposed to using natural fertilizers), not allowing soils to recover by letting it recover a season after reaping - instead, sewing and reaping over and over again, making the soil completely fallow if not for the ammonia and other petro chemicals injected into it.

Then of course, this doesn't stop there, as so much food is frozen, refrigerated, preserved, sprayed with pesticides, bio-engineered to be more resistant to certain insects and diseases, and so on. Humans who do not directly live off the land (which are quite a good many millions and billions of this crowded earth) are nowhere as healthy or naturally nourished with the full potency vitamins and minerals available to their more agrarian ancestors of 200 years ago.

So if you simply had your knowledge of good hygiene and germs, you'd live so well 200 years ago. Only because everybody else around you had bad health and poor hygiene would you be susceptible to consumption, Polio and other diseases we don't see so often these days. (I actually don't know how contagious Polio is/was.)

Today's flu is something that brings the immune system down a while, so the next virus that comes along will take over from where it left off. The weather sure is helping it - and the fact you MUST go into an office, school, other public space with people having what may be a mutated flu or cold (there are 150 varieties of the latter, according to estimates), unless you have one of those hazmat suits, you're quite likely to catch their biological "pollution."