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About 99 percent of the world’s population lives in an area where air quality could reach levels of pollution that may be harmful to their health, the World Health Organization said.
Maria Neira, the director of environment at the WHO, called it “unacceptable” that there are seven million “preventable deaths and countless preventable lost years of good health due to air pollution.”
The BBC, citing the 2021 World Air Quality Report, said 21 of the world’s 30 cities with the worst levels of pollution are in India. The number includes six Indian cities that are in the top 10.
The WHO made its guidelines tougher and pointed out that people in low and middle-income countries suffer more exposure to PM10 and PM2.5 pollutants.
The Financial Times reported that even wealthier countries are impacted by air pollution. About 400,000 deaths in Europe are caused by air pollution.
“High fossil fuel prices, energy security and the urgency of addressing the twin health challenges of air pollution and climate change underscores the pressing need to move faster towards a world that is much less dependent on fossil fuels,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general, said, according to the FT.
Air pollution is a bigger killer than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined, EuroNews reported, citing a recent study in the Air Quality Life Index. The report said particulate pollution is more devastating on life expectancy than smoking or war. (See “AIR POLLUTION KILLING 3.5 TIMES MORE THAN COVID,” “40 PERCENT OF AMERICANS BREATHE UNHEALTHY AIR” and “AIR POLLUTION KILLING CHILDREN BEFORE THEY ARE BORN.”)
TRENDPOST: A 2021 study from the WHO found that more than 10 million people die each year from air pollution, compared to the 6.2 million who died from COVID since the outbreak in 2020.
We have pointed out that the COVID War still increases newspaper sales and boosts TV, but killer pollution emissions do not.
Micheal Greenstone, one of the scientists who created the AQLI, agreed. He called air pollution the “greatest external threat to human health on the planet.” He also pointed out that it is not “widely recognized, or not recognized with the force and vigor that one might expect.”
Eloise Marais, an associate professor of geography at University College London and a co-author of a study air pollution in the tropics that was published Friday in the journal Science Advances, said air quality is “degrading so rapidly and population is increasing so rapidly, we estimated really, really steep trends in urban population exposure to air pollution, with implications for urban public health.”