What you can’t smell can kill you

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Beware, it doesn’t take a running car in a closed garage to deliver enough carbon monoxide to poison a person. Low levels, once thought insignificant, of the invisible, odorless gas may be causing considerable brain and heart damage in countless unsuspecting people, reports the BALTIMORE SUN.

Symptoms commonly written off as stress, such as headaches, mood changes, forgetfulness, and fatigue can indicate carbon-monoxide poisoning. The gas may come from old furnaces, gas stoves, or car exhaust, and illness can be caused by extremely low concentrations. Victims can be anywhere — cities, suburbs, or rural areas — and often go months without realizing something’s wrong.

Further studies are ongoing, but, says a pharmocologist from the Connecticut Poison Control Center, “I feel it is a much larger public health problem than anyone has any concept of at present.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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