Water quality has been in the news quite a bit recently, but the quality of something you take into your body every moment of every day — the air we all breathe — doesn’t seem to make waves very often.

Except this month every year. The results of the American Lung Association’s annual State of the Air report are in and — relatively speaking — are good. Relatively, because it appears we’re on the right track and because we have a long, long way yet to go.

The ALA’s report says the country is on the right track thanks in large part to the federal Clean Air Act of 1970, but also points out that just four American metropolitan areas — and one of those is in Hawaii — have had regular access to healthy air in recent years.

Put another way, more than one in two people had “unhealthy air quality” in their communities last year, according to the report.

That includes people in southwestern Pennsylvania, where the Pittsburgh metro area ranked among the most polluted cities in the country for particle pollution and high ozone days.

Ozone, one of the most widespread and dangerous pollutants in the U.S., can cause breathing and cardiovascular problems, damage the central nervous system and shorten a person’s life span. Particle pollution — that sooty smoke billowing out of a vehicle’s tailpipe is an example — can do similar things.

Both types of pollution are of particular concern to the young, the old, and people who have preexisting respiratory or medical conditions like heart disease.

In Butler County ... well, we don’t know exactly how Butler County measures up when it comes to air quality. There’s no data in the ALA report for here or 30 other counties in Pennsylvania. That’s more than 46 percent of the state that either doesn’t monitor air quality at all, or hasn’t collected enough data to be useful.

Perhaps we can extrapolate from the letter grades the report gives to our neighbors that actually do have monitors: Allegheny County — F; Armstrong County — F; Beaver County — F; Westmoreland County — F; Lawrence County — F; Mercer County — F.

A lack of air quality data isn’t uncommon. In fact, more than two-thirds of the 3,068 counties nationwide don’t monitor it — and some entire states were left out of this year’s ALA report altogether. Florida and Illinois don’t have any data in the report at all, meaning information on air quality in major cities like Chicago, St. Louis and Miami, where millions of people live, isn’t available. Data from most of Tennessee is missing as well.

A least people facing a crisis of potable water have some recourse — whether it’s forming a water bank, buying bottled water from a store or — in the case of Flint — criminal charges against the people responsible for the pollution. At this point there isn’t exactly a short-term way to replace your dirty, hazardous air with a more breathable substitute.

Everyone likes to say that nature is one of Pennsylvania’s greatest assets — our hiking and biking trails, state parks, game lands, etc.

But it’s pretty difficult to enjoy those things if the air you breathe is harming your body, shortening your life, and exacerbating medical conditions you already have — with you non-the-wiser and incapable of making informed decisions that might positively impact your health.

It seems like the least we can do is tell people how polluted their air actually is.