Photo credit: Timothy Valentine licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
Ban the awful leaf blowers. That’s the headline for a letter to the editor in the Camden New Journal, an independent newspaper in London.
The writer includes some details of leaf blower history that I didn’t know, namely:
Users have been known to die from psittacosis, a respiratory disease caused by the inhalation of the dust of bird droppings blown up by a leaf blower.
Central Park in New York banned leaf blowers, hedge strimmers and edging tools after one of their young gardeners, who had used a leaf blower regularly, died suddenly from psittacosis.
But perhaps the best part is the alteration of one of Chardin’s paintings by a cartoonist.
We couldn’t agree more with the writer’s calls for a leaf blower ban to protect humans and animals and the environment.
