Thought: Big city living...big health problems..

I hail from India, which is a developing country.........

But I have been lucky to be born in a place where natural calamities were rare...

Summer was hot, but bearable....rain was abundant, almost four months.....winter was mild..

Earthquake had rattled the place once or twice.....cyclone had battered some times...

But, no damage was done.....I did not have to experience how disasters feel..

Then I moved to the USA........

After living in Costa Mesa, California for two years, we moved to San Diego, California..........

We lived in a decent neighborhood in Mission Valley, San Diego....during the stay here which spanned three years..many strange, unpleasant things happened...

Here, for the first time I smelled the burning chaparral smokes...the hazy sky..the constant threat of evacuation...

Then some gas leak from a 'Humanities building' that buids housing materials, would wake us up in the midnight...the noxious chemical was extremely foul-smelling...I can tolerate organic, drain stench, but this chemical threatened to make us senseless or cause respiratory issues...If you are aware of the 1984 methyl isocyanate gas tragedy in Bhopal, India, you must know how risky they are.. 

When it happened too regularly, I messaged to NBC News (local news paper)..my repeated messages went unheard..

Then the most dangerous problem.....the house got infested with cockroaches, the tiny but rapid-proliferating German cockroach....I got so severely allergic, my immune, neural and hormonal system went out of control...the constant inflammation would cause rash, anxiety, food intolerance, cross-reactivity to leather, latex, nickel...

even at the peak of allergy I had rashes from the shower water and my spouse's touch...the strange headaches indicated my biomedical researcher self how neural diseases start...

The constant noise of nearby highway I-15 and the benzene-laden exhausts of vehicles choking my breathe was a pain...I feared, if I would keep inhaling those xenobiotics, my lungs would complain..

I would have happily left the place, given the health issues, but my studies in SDSU would not finish...Thanks God...it was over finally, for I worked hard, despite the illnesses, to expedite my research..

Now, we live in Irvine...known as America's safest city......

As we sleep to the fresh breeze of jacaranda, and wake up the chirps of sparrows, it feels amazing...

No more cockroaches...

I am healing.....but, my anguish remains to have fallen sick for no fault of mine...

San Diego the top 10 populous city in USA is a great city with vicinity to desert, valley, coast, mountains........it should be kept beautiful, not only infrastructure, but the air and quality of life as well.........

The other day I was reading how rat problem in Chicago is so intense that shelter cats being sold at above $500 in a bid to catch them........Apart from economic burden, the rodents are posing the risk of leptospirosis...........

Los Angeles and Seattle are not lagging behind in air pollution..