New research linking smog exposure to long-term childhood and adult asthma ‘a wakeup call,’ underlining dangers posed by polluted city air says Blueair

Stockholm, Sweden, July 13, 2016 – Sixty years after Londoners suffered five consecutive days of severe air pollution, people’s health is still being affected according to a new study by American scientists. The findings should serve as an urgent health ‘wake-up call’ to anyone bringing up children in a city, says Blueair, a leader in indoor air purification technologies.

“Children aren’t given any choice about where they live which makes this new research pretty terrifying for anyone who is bringing up a child in cities like Beijing, Delhi or anywhere else for that matter where air pollution is a daily norm,” said Blueair founder and CEO Bengt Rittri.

A father of two, Bengt started Blueair twenty years ago this year with the ambition to make the best air purifiers in the world because of his fears of the harm air pollution could be doing his son and daughter. Today millions of people worldwide daily rely on Blueair’s indoor air purifiers to help them battle indoor air contamination caused by polluted air entering homes and workplaces or posed by chemicals and other substances emitted from household cleaning products, furnishing and building materials.

Published in the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine on July 8, 2016, the study compared the health of nearly 3,000 people who lived in London during the Great Smog with a similar group living people outside the British capital. The researchers reported that the prevalence of childhood asthma was 20 percent higher among people exposed to the event during their first year of life, while adult asthma rates were 9.5 percent higher. Also, the study showed that exposure while in the womb led to an 8 percent higher risk of asthma.

“The potential long run health impact on children exposed during the early stages of their life to air pollution flagged up by this latest study is a frightening concept when it comes to the health and wellness of future generations and governments need to act with speed to address the challenge,” said Bengt Rittri.

Read the study here: http://www.thoracic.org/about/newsroom/press-releases/great-smog-and-asthma.pdf

For more information, please contact

David Noble, Blueair global public relations and communications, 


+44 7785 302 694 or david.noble@blueair.se