Leaf blowers: perfect delivery systems for airborne pathogens

Good reasons to ban “leaf blowing” machines keep piling up in my head. Swine-bird flu in the news this week sensitizes everyone to air-borne pathogens. Austin residents stay constantly aware of air-borne allergens – pollen, mold, dust mite excrement, what have you. Some yeas ago, hantavirus outbreaks sensitized Americans of the semi-arid Southwest to the dangers of inhaling dust that contains traces of mouse feces. Many got sick; several people died. People with compromised immune systems (AIDS) find out about the dangers of toxoplasmosis (transmitted via cat feces) in the most gruesome ways. Thanks to a population of feral cats in the city, landscape dust contains this pathogen.

All sorts of potential disease vectors reside in soil and dust. Indeed, soil could not provide all the benefits to life if it did not contain a multitude of things that we should not inhale. That said, it seems insane to intentionally stir them up and blow them around where we can breathe them in.

Takoma Park, Maryland, as recently as January 2009, began discussing a ban. “Takoma Park residents presented a letter to Mayor Williams requesting … ‘city action to phase out the use of gasoline-powered leaf blowers in Takoma Park.’ The letter states that harmful emissions, energy inefficiency, and noise results from the use of the leaf blowers.” Council work session documentation enumerates municipalities that have already enacted bans on “leaf blowers:” Berkeley and Palo Alto in California; Township of Montclair, New Jersey; and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“Leaf blowers,” or as I prefer to call them – dust cannons, when new and operating according to manufacturer’s specifications emit ear splitting noise, noxious pollution, and dust that we would never tolerate from any motorized vehicle on our city streets. Inefficient, unsophisticated motors that power the dust blowing machines, in addition to disseminating biological agents of disease, contribute to our ground-level ozone pollution problem.

Blowers emit copious quantities of unburned hydrocarbons (aka: volatile organic compounds or “VOCs”). When VOCs meet other combustion by-products (e.g.: NOx, SOx) in the presence of sunlight, they produce photochemical smog. Smog contains a large component of ozone. This form of oxygen, when suspended in the stratosphere, protects us from damaging ultraviolet light. However, near the ground, ozone causes serious lung damage when inhaled. Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety gives an alarming summary of the health threats.

Ozone pollution in the air we breathe seems a particularly dangerous companion to airborne toxins and pathogens contained in dust. Even in small quantities, inhaled ozone increases our bodies’ adverse reactions to everything else in the air. Leaf blowers seem perfectly designed to deliver allergens and pathogens to our respiratory systems – in the most irritating and destructive manner possible.
When someone becomes contagious with the flu, we admonish them to stay home so as to avoid transmitting the disease by sneezing or coughing germs into the air that we all breathe. Why in the world do we allow people to intentionally use power tools to blast dust into the air and emit chemicals that make our lungs even more vulnerable to the pathogens residing in the dust? Landscape blowers represent a clear and present danger. We must ban them for the sake of public health and safety.

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