India and China lead the world in pollution deaths; global pollution kills 9 million people a year: Study

AP

Washington, May 18

A new study blames pollution of all types for 9 million deaths a year globally, with the death toll attributed to dirty air from cars, trucks, and industry rising 55 per cent since 2000.

The United States is the only fully industrialised country in the top 10 nations for total pollution deaths, ranking 7th with 142,883 deaths blamed on pollution in 2019, sandwiched between Bangladesh and Ethiopia, according to a new study in the journal The Lancet Planetary Health.

Tuesday’s pre-pandemic study is based on calculations derived from the Global Burden of Disease database and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle.

India and China lead the world in pollution deaths with nearly 2.4 million and almost 2.2 million deaths a year, but the two nations also have the world’s largest populations.

When deaths are put on a per population rate, the United States ranks 31st from the bottom at 43.6 pollution deaths per lakh. Chad and the Central African Republic rank the highest with rates about 300 pollution deaths per lakh, more than half of them due to tainted water, while Brunei, Qatar, and Iceland have the lowest pollution death rates ranging from 15 to 23. The global average is 117 pollution deaths per lakh people.

Pollution kills about the same number of people a year around the world as cigarette smoking and second-hand smoke combined, the study said.

“9 million deaths is a lot of deaths,” said Philip Landrigan, director of the Global Public Health Program and Global Pollution Observatory at Boston College.

“The bad news is that it’s not decreasing,” Landrigan said.

The certificates for these deaths don’t say pollution. They list heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, other lung issues and diabetes that are “tightly correlated” with pollution by numerous epidemiological studies, Landrigan said.

Researchers look at the number of deaths by cause, exposure to pollution weighted for various factors, and then complicated exposure response calculations derived by large epidemiological studies based on thousands of people over decades of study, he said. It’s the same way scientists can say cigarettes cause cancer and heart disease deaths.

Renee Salas, an emergency room doctor and Harvard professor who wasn’t part of the study, said “While people focus on decreasing their blood pressure and cholesterol, few recognise that the removal of air pollution is an important prescription to improve their heart health,” Salas said.

In New Delhi, India, air pollution peaks in the winter months and last year the city saw just two days when the air wasn’t considered polluted. It was the first time in four years that the city experienced a clean air day during the winter months.

“This data is a reminder of what is going wrong but also that it is an opportunity to fix it,” Roychowdhury said.