Originally Posted by
localizer
This study is particularly concerning. I wonder if the “healthy” people he studied were of the same age.
Also, it mentions he examined only former pilots and cabin crew who “experienced complaints.” What about the pilots/FAs who did not experience complaints? Shouldn’t they be tested as well to check their brain activity?
Perhaps the brain issues in the selected group is not due to chronic exposure to fumes, but rather some other neuro issue. If they were retired flight crew they must be high in age. One can hope.
The problem with aerotoxic syndrome is that it is a secondary or tertiary level problem. You cannot easily design an experiment where you have a variable group and a control group. This methodology only looks at singular effects.
Instead of assuming that something is safe until proven otherwise, we should assume it us unsafe until proven safe. Every fume we encounter should be treated as a pollutant which we are not normally subjected to in a healthy lifestyle, in nature. So every sweet smell (deice fluid) or baking bread smell (oil) should be treated as a pollutant by default. From recent company statements, we can clearly see they are attempting to "normalize" common pollutants such as APU exhaust ingestion. We should not allow this. All of these things are bad even if we have been experiencing them for years. It just shows they have done nothing to fix the problem, not that it's an acceptable part of the job.
Furthermore, we must redefine was "safe" means. To regulators, this means the opposite of death. So if it gives you great illness, it may not necessarily be considered "unsafe". Nomenclature matters. Unsafe should be defined as anything which has a persistent stasis of any length starting at the removal of the exposure source. It's funny how Illegal drugs are considered unsafe, even if it has a minor effect on health, but aerotoxic syndrome is not given an eye wink by the government.