Walking or cycling to school is better for children’s health as cars are ‘boxes collecting toxic gases, says David King.

          Children are at risk of dangerous levels of air pollution in cars because exposure to toxic air is often far higher inside than outside vehicles, a former government chief scientific adviser has warned.

          Prof David King, writing for The Guardian, says walking or cycling to school would be much better for children’s health. The warning comes as the UK government faces a third legal defeat for failing to tackle the country’s illegal levels of air pollution. Air pollution is known to damage children’s developing lungs but recent research also indicates it harms children’s ability to learn 

at school and may damage their DNA.

          “Children sitting in the backseat of vehicles are likely to be exposed to dangerous levels of Air Pollution,” said King. 

          “You may be driving a cleaner vehicle but your children are sitting in a box collecting toxic gases from all the vehicles around you.”

           He said new legislation to ban smoking in cars with children had gained widespread support, but he questioned “why are we still happy for our children to breathe in toxic emissions in the back of our cars?”

          “The best thing for all our health is to leave our cars behind,” said Prof King,who is an advisor to the British Lung Foundation. “It’s been shown that the health benefits

of walking and cycling far outweigh the costs of breathing in pollution. If more drivers knew the damage they could be doing to their children, I think they’d think twice about getting in the car.”

          He cited range of experiments, some as far back as 2001, have shown that drivers inside vehicles are exposed to far higher levels of air pollution than those walking or cycling along the same urban routes.

          He was supported by Prof Stephen Holgate, an asthma expert at Southampton University who said there was enough evidence to tell parents that walking and cycling exposes their children to less air pollution than driving. “It is nine to 12 times higher inside the car than outside,” he said. “Children are in the back of the car and often the car has the fans on, just sucking the fresh exhaust coming out of the car or lorry in front of them straight into the back of the car.”

       Children are more vulnerable than 

adults, he said, because air pollution can stunt the growth of their lungs and because it increases the risk of sensation which can lead to asthma and other respiratory conditions.

           Their views were also strongly endorsed by a leading Irish based expert on air pollution, Prof John Sodeau of UCC Centre for Research into Atmospheric Chemistry. The risks in Ireland were the same but air pollution monitoring was inadequate in Ireland; so much so we did not even know the scale of air pollution outside a vehicle, he said. The big difference between Ireland and London, for example, was a far greater capacity for roadside air monitoring.

          We cannot avoid this piece of information. Today we are trying to get everything easily. We are not even ready to walk. For a very short distance too, we will prefer to go by a car. This is actually a warning note to end this really bad habit of ours.