How the Inversion Can Affect Long-Term Health

Your nose runs and you might cough a few times during the day, even though you don’t have a cold. For otherwise healthy people, those are the immediate effects of a bad air day in Salt Lake City. And when the inversion goes away, so do those symptoms. But the inversion also impacts our health over the long term. Heidi Hanson is a researcher who investigates how polluted air affects people during the course of their lives. As a result, she is familiar with much of the research that has been done documenting the long-term effects of bad air. We ask her what we know about its impacts on long-term health, who the high-risk groups are and how serious the problem really is. Image credit: MATEOUTAH via CC/FLICKR