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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% since 2000.
That increase is offset by fewer pollution deaths from primitive indoor stoves and water contaminated with human and animal waste, so overall pollution deaths in 2019 are about the same as in 2015.
The United States is the only fully industrialized country in the top 10 nations for total pollution deaths, ranking 7th with 142,883 deaths blamed on pollution in 2019.
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 100,000.
Chad and the Central African Republic ranked the highest with rates of about 300 pollution deaths per 100,000, more than half of them due to tainted water.
Brunei, Qatar, and Iceland have the lowest pollution death rates ranging from 15 to 23. The global average is 117 pollution deaths per 100,000 people.
Pollution kills about the same number of people a year around the world as cigarette smoking and second-hand smoke combined.
Nine million deaths is many deaths. The bad news is that it is not decreasing. The world is making gains in the easy stuff and seeing the more difficult stuff, which is the ambient outdoor industrial air pollution and the chemical pollution, still going up. It does not have to be this way.
They are preventable deaths. Each death is unnecessary. The calculations made sense and if anything was so conservative about what it attributed to pollution, the real death toll is likely higher.
The certificates for these deaths do not say pollution. They list heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, other lung issues, and diabetes that are “tightly correlated” with pollution by numerous epidemiological studies.
While people focus on decreasing their blood pressure and cholesterol, few recognize that the removal of air pollution is an important prescription to improve their heart health.
Three-quarters of the overall pollution deaths come from air pollution and the overwhelming part of that is “a combination of pollution from stationary sources like coal-fired power plants and steel mills on one hand and mobile sources like cars, trucks, and buses. It is getting worse around the world as countries develop and cities grow.
Air pollution remains the leading cause of death in South Asia. The increase in these deaths means that toxic emissions from vehicles and energy generation are increasing. This data is a reminder of what is going wrong but it is also an opportunity to fix it.
Pollution deaths are soaring in the poorest areas, experts say. This problem is worst in areas of the world where the population is most dense and where financial and government resources to address the pollution problem are limited.
In 2000, industrial air pollution killed about 2.9 million people a year globally. By 2015, it was up to 4.2 million and in 2019, it was 4.5 million. Lead pollution kills 900,000 people a year, while water pollution is responsible for 1.4 million deaths a year. Occupational health pollution adds another 870,000 deaths.
In the United States, about 20,000 people a year die from lead pollution-induced hypertension, heart disease, and kidney disease, mostly as occupational hazards. Lead and asbestos are America’s big chemical occupational hazards, and they kill about 65,000 people a year from pollution.
The number of air pollution deaths in the United States in 2019 was 60,229, far more than deaths on American roads, which hit a 16-year peak of nearly 43,000 last year.
Modern types of pollution are rising in most countries, especially developing ones, but fell from 2000 to 2019 in the United States, and the European Union. Taking measures to prevent pollution spread is a must.
