For some time, people have noticed Bakersfield, California. Not as “the birthplace of the country music genre known worldwide as the Bakersfield Sound” or because it has more Basque restaurants than any other town in the country. Bakersfield gets a lot of unwanted attention because it is the most polluted city in the United States. (Number 2 Hanford City, California, can eat its dust.)

This is the kind of distinction that makes one self-conscious. You hate to stand out for being the worst at anything, particularly particulates.

But Bakersfield shouldn’t worry about taking a lot of gas (or ozone) from people because a new report shows that it’s nothing special as a polluter, that its alveoli-clogging vapors are still leagues ahead of the soup that passes for atmosphere in Beijing and Shanghai.

Stories have circulated for years about the poor air quality in China. Factories were shuttered ahead of the 2008 Olympics so that athletes wouldn’t have a career-ending injury because they inhaled. Executives posted to Chinese cities would install air filtration systems in their homes so their children wouldn’t contract black lung disease sitting in their living rooms watching bears ride bicycles or whatever it is that’s on Shanghai TV.

But the anecdotes pale next to the hard numbers, collected by the U.S. Embassy and various U.S. consulates and reported by Business Insider, which are staggering.

Using “a scale developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency… and other agencies called the Air Quality Index (AQI),” the outposts give regular updates on the harm that diplomats do to themselves by living in the exotic East. The embassy coyly notes that AQI statistics “can help inform health-related decisions,” like when to leave this dangerous job behind and get a job sand-blasting lead paint in Bakersfield. An “AQI value of 50 represents good air quality with little potential to affect public health, while an AQI value over 300 represents hazardous air quality.”

At 5 p.m. on October 26, the BeijingAir twitter reported an AQI of 379. Currently, the AQI for Bakersfield is 62.

Breathe easy Bakersfield. But just to be safe, do it somewhere else.

Image: Morning haze (Tianjin, China), by Shubert Ciencia, via Wikimedia Commons.