WASHINGTON, DC: In a press release given last week at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the nation’s foremost atmospheric scientists revealed their most recent discovery: the People’s Republic of China’s latest scheme to relieve themselves of their well-publicized and widely-known air pollution problem.

“We were hanging out in the air lab,” explained Professor Jeremy Wrind, the lead investigator in the discovery, “and John walked in waving around the box he had just picked up from the mail room.” The box, Wrind continued to explain, held the third in a series of personalized 3-D printed foosball figurines for the office foosball table. This one was of Randall Johnson, often referred to as “that asshole from accounting,” and the office team was excited to attach the figurine to the gaming setup, to “take out frustration” and to “show that guy who’s who.”

The six atmospheric scientists in the lab at the time excitedly gathered around a lab table to open the box, which held a carefully wrapped figurine, a shipping invoice, and a bunch of those air cushion-y things. You know, those things that Amazon uses in case someone in the post office decides to use your box as target practice for their brand new sledgehammer that their son-in-law gave to them for their birthday. “While we were cutting the tape on the box, I guess John’s knife cut through one of the airbags, because when we opened it, a smell reminiscent of fifteen coal-fired smokestacks filled the room,” Wrind explained. “Harry, who has asthma, passed out in twenty seconds and we had to call an ambulance to get him conscious again.” The lab was declared a hazardous waste site for a full week until emergency teams were able to get rid of the contaminated air.

Once the NOAA science pros had access to their lab again, they began to look into exactly what had happenedthe week before. This time, in proper HAZ-MAT suits, they opened up an airbag and ran it through a machiney thing in the lab to figure out what was in it. The results were surprising– coal, car exhaust, and microscopic iPhone components. “The only place in the world where all of these can be found together is China,” declared Wrind, “and this isn’t the first time this has happened.”

After a short collaboration with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the team was able to make a connection between Amazon packages being shipped from China and a string of what had incorrectly been diagnosed as “Breather’s Lung.” The sudden appearance of Breather’s Lung, with cases popping up across the United States, had baffled CDC’s best epidemiologists, who had just kind of assumed it was another one of those things Americans tended to get, like excessive amounts of firearms
or obesity. Epidemiologist Lisa Sanders, coordinator of the CDC’s Breather’s Lung task force, commented that  “This discovery will revolutionize how we handle Breather’s Lung cases, and hopefully get us one step closer to a cure.”

This discovery has rattled politicians on Capitol Hill as well, who don’t quite know how to handle this situation. “It’s really clear that China is using us to get rid of some of their air pollution, and we can’t retaliate. We don’t ship… anything to them,” said Representative Clark Hanna, “So I don’t know what to tell you.” A bipartisan bill was passed yesterday during an emergency session of Congress to provide air filters and masks to families and businesses who had yet to receive, or could not avoid receiving, the contaminated packages. The filters and masks, guaranteed to eliminate some of the worst contaminants found in the airbags, will find their way to American doorsteps later this week. Residents have been told to expect their package to arrive from Shanghai Filters, Inc.