If you’re like many health-concious adults today, you’re preoccupied with what goes into your body. Are you drinking enough water; getting the right kinds of carbohydrates and fats; watching your sugar intake?

What about the question: Are you breathing enough pollution-free air each day? Odds are, even if you’re obsessed with your health, you’re not asking that one. But you should be.

In April the American Lung Association released its 2017 report on air quality, and the news for Western Pennsylvania was mixed. On one hand, there’s been improvement in overall air quality for many Pennsylvanians. On the other, there’s a lack of data and persistent problems with ozone pollution. More needs to be done.

Pittsburgh is once again notably present in this year’s report, ranking 17th on the list of 25 worst cities for short-term pollution, and eighth on the list of 25 worst cities for year-round pollution. Allegheny County ranks 13th on the report’s list of 25 counties with the most people at-risk because of year-round pollution.

The commonwealth overall turned in a shameful showing on air quality in the 2017 report. Of the 25 worst cities for year-round particle pollution, Pennsylvania has eight — tied with California for the most of any state.

If that sounds bad, it gets worse: Of the 67 counties in Pennsylvania, 42 — including Butler — didn’t monitor air quality at all, according to the report. That’s more than 3 million people — one-quarter of the state’s 12.8 million residents — who don’t know anything at all about the quality of their air.

That’s a problem, considering more than one third of people in the United States live in areas with unhealthy levels of ozone pollution — one of the most widespread and dangerous pollutants in the United States. Ozone can cause breathing and cardiovascular problems, damage the central nervous system and shorten a person’s life span.

That’s 116.5 million people living in conditions that could negatively impact their health and ultimately shorten their lives. And those are just the people living in areas where air is actually monitored. Air quality monitors are located in fewer than 1,000 of the 3,068 counties across the United States.

Like Butler County residents, those people will have to extrapolate from the grades the report gives their neighbors who actually do have monitors. Let’s see how Butler did using that metric: Allegheny County — F; Armstrong County — F; Beaver County — F; Westmoreland County — D; Lawrence County — C; Mercer County — D.

This kind of poor air quality can — and does — have serious effects on both the young and old in our country. It can exacerbate conditions like chronic bronchitis and has a direct link to temporary and lifetime asthma, which the Pennsylvania Department of Health says is on the rise among children here.

There’s not just a human cost to these public health issues, there’s a dollars-and-cents cost as well. In 2015 PDE estimated that about one-quarter of adults and children missed either work or school because of asthma. The cost of work absenteeism alone was estimated at $181 million. By 2020 the total healthcare cost of asthma to Pennsylvania is expected to top $2.7 billion.

And that’s just one health condition impacted by poor air quality.

One easy way to address these issues is to start providing people with the focused, local data that can help them make informed decisions about their health.