India among worst hit, pollution gets deadlier than wars & AIDS

“Pollution is the largest environmental cause of disease and premature death in the world today. Diseases caused by pollution were responsible for an estimated 9 million premature deaths in 2015,” the study released on Thursday in The Lancet medical jourl noted. 

The study, the first to put together data on disease and death caused by all forms of pollution combined, said 16 per cent of all deaths worldwide were attributable to the environmental pollution.

This figure is three times more than the deaths from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined and 15 times more than from all wars and other forms of violence. It is also one-and-a-half times higher than the number of people killed by smoking and over six times the number of people dying in road accidents. In the most severely affected countries, pollution-related disease are responsible for more than one death in four, it said.

Epidemiologist Philip Landrigan, dean of global health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sii, and the lead author on the report said pollution has never received the desired attention of world leaders, civil society and health professiols. “There’s been a lot of study of pollution, but it has never received the resources or level of attention as, say, Aids or climate change,” Landrigan said. “Despite its substantial effects on human health, the economy, and the environment, pollution has been neglected, especially in low-income and middle-income countries, and the health effects of pollution are under-estimated in calculations of the global burden of disease.”

The report said that pollution in low-income and middle-income countries caused by industrial emissions, vehicular exhaust, and toxic chemicals has particularly been overlooked in both the intertiol development and the global health agendas. Stating that several cities in India and Chi had recorded alarming annual concentrations of PM2·5 pollution, the study said over 50 per cent of global deaths due to ambient air pollution in 2015 occurred in India and Chi. 

“Ambient air pollution in rapidly expanding mega-cities such as New Delhi and Beijing attracts the greatest public attention. However, WHO documents that the problem of ambient air pollution is widespread in low-income and middle-income countries and finds that 98 per cent of urban areas in developing countries with populations of more than 100,000 people fail to meet the WHO global air quality guideline for PM2·5 pollution of 10 µg/m3 of ambient air annually.” Other countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, North Korea, South Sudan and Haiti have seen nearly one in every fifth premature deaths caused by pollution. (IANS)