“Our data add to a growing body of evidence that particulate matter is really harmful to health, increasing overall mortality, mostly deaths from cardiovascular disease, as well as deaths from respiratory disease in nonsmokers”, said lead study investigator George Thurston, professor at New York University Langone Medical Centre. Respiratory diseases and lung cancer cause another 25 percent of premature deaths.
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Calculating the effects of outdoor air pollution on a global scale is challenging.
The study involves air pollutants called particulates, in this case tiny particles 2.5 micrometers or less.
Coupling air pollution data with country-specific population and health statistics from WHO, researchers were able to measure the effect different sources of outdoor air pollution had on premature deaths. [10 of the Most Polluted Places on Earth].
The United States came seventh in the top-ranked countries, with an estimated 55,000 deaths linked to air pollution.
The study reported that over 500,000 people in America said that they have noticed air pollution levels rise in the regions they live.
It will be hard to avoid doubling these numbers in the next 35 years, because a huge part of the problem results from individual, small sources – home heaters and cook stoves.
The study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, is one of the largest, most detailed of its kind in the United States.
Smouldering cooking and heating fires in India and China were the single biggest danger – accounting for a third of deaths attributed to outdoor pollution, said study co-author Jos Lelieveld of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany.
Ammonia air pollution from farms can be reduced “at relatively low costs”, Robinson said.
According to Thurston, fine particles can contribute to the development of potentially fatal heart and lung diseases because they slip past the body’s defenses and can be absorbed deep into the lungs and bloodstream.
Last year, the World Health Organization estimated that seven million people die prematurely because of pollution.
By now we know that air pollution is not only bad for the environment but also bad for our health. The study shows that cutting down on deforestation in Brazil, where land is often cleared by burning, has caused particulate matter concentrations to decline by about 30 percent during the dry season, preventing anywhere from 400 t0 1,700 premature deaths. About 15 percent of the Brazilian Amazon was deforested between 1976 and 2010 ─ most of it by burning ─ in order to make way for farms.
While per capita mortality attributable to air pollution is already extraordinary in Chinese mega cities, continuation of current trends would mean Indian mega-cities would overtake Chinese by 2050. It was the largest survey ever conducted assessing the link between increased deaths and tiny, toxic particles in the air.
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In the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, natural sources of air pollution, such as desert storm dust, were the dominant contributor to premature mortality, according to the study. “Our study shows that it is particularly important to reduce pollution emissions from residential energy use in Asia”. But an unexpected finding was that the biggest contributor to pollution is agriculture emissions – that is, pollutants from fertilizers, manure and treatment of animal waste – in the eastern United States, Europe, Russian Federation and East Asia.
