There’s an adage that goes: “In a developing country, don’t drink the water. In a developed country, don’t breathe the air.”

This adage arose during a dirtier age — then a gift of a newly industrialized society. But in the last several decades we’ve gained a much greater understanding of the ills of air pollution, and have done great things like create a cap-and-trade mechanism for sulfur dioxide and NOx to reduce acid rain. Surely that old canard only now applies to rapidly developing countries like China and India.

My intern sent me an article recently that shattered this illusion, and reminded me that air pollution is by no means a thing of the distant past or equally distant Orient. Titled “Particules fines : 5e jour d’alerte en région parisienne” (fine particles: fifth day of alert for the Paris region), the article from Le Monde Planète describes that the Paris region had particulate counts that are off-the-charts — e.g., over 80 micrograms of PM10 (particles smaller than 10 microns in diameter per cubic meter) — for the fifth consecutive day on the 13th of this month. According to the article, particles this fine are known to exacerbate respiratory conditions like asthma and allergies, and even finer particles (2.5um) are proven carcinogenic. (Translations from the original French article here are my own, so please take them with un grain de sel.)

The article describes how Paris currently has a perfect storm of poor air quality. In winter, like any major urban center, Paris generates plenty of emissions from heating, industrial usage, and diesel fumes. But for this stretch, the winter climate also created meteorological conditions of cold, dry, and still air, which led to the pollutants remaining trapped.

A coworker of mine who lives in Paris described how this recent spate of high pollution has significantly affected her life. Each day, she consults an app that reports the air quality of Paris, and on days when it’s this high, she cancels any plans to go outdoors with her young son.

It’s a sorry state of affairs when we are trapped inside by the very world we’ve labored to create.