Before my eldest was due to go on a school trip to China, she researched quite a bit about the country before embarking on her journey.
She realised Chinese food is not what we have grown accustomed to here, pointing and staring is normal, spitting is common and not everyone will understand English.
However, one of her main fears was pollution. She worried about drinking water over there and walking around in the polluted environment. A day after she got back from her trip, a newspaper article caught both our eyes... ‘Pollution kills more than smoking’ was the headline and it named China’s environment as the second deadliest after India!
I was actually quite shocked to read that environmental pollution, from filthy air to contaminated water, was killing more people every year than all war and violence in the world.
I was not surprised but shocked at the level it has come to.
More than smoking, hunger or natural disasters, Aids, tuberculosis and malaria combined!
One out of every six premature deaths in the world in 2015 – about nine million – could be attributed to disease from toxic exposure, according to a study released last week.
The study in The Lancet medical journal says the financial cost from pollution-related death, sickness and welfare is equally massive, costing some $4.6 trillion in annual losses – or about 6.2 per cent of the global economy.
The report marks the first attempt to pull together data on disease and death caused by all forms of pollution combined.
“Pollution is a massive problem that people aren’t seeing because they’re looking at scattered bits of it,” says epidemiologist Philip Landrigan, dean of global health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and the lead author of the report.
Experts say the 9m premature deaths the study found was just a partial estimate and the number of people killed by pollution is undoubtedly higher and will be quantified once more research is done and new methods of assessing harmful impacts are developed.
Areas like Sub-Saharan Africa have yet to even set up air pollution monitoring systems. Soil pollution has received scant attention. And there are still plenty of potential toxins still being ignored, with less than half of the 5,000 new chemicals widely dispersed throughout the environment since 1950 having been tested for safety or toxicity.
Asia and Africa are the regions putting the most people at risk, while India tops the list of individual countries. One out of every four premature deaths in India in 2015, or some 2.5m, was attributed to pollution, the study found.
China’s environment was the second deadliest, with more than 1.8m premature deaths, or one in five, blamed on pollution-related illness.
Several other countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, North Korea, South Sudan and Haiti also see nearly a fifth of their premature deaths caused by pollution.
To reach its figures, the study’s authors used methods outlined by the US Environmental Protection Agency for assessing field data from soil tests, as well as with air and water pollution data from the Global Burden of Disease, an ongoing study run by institutions including the World Health Organisation and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
As we know it is most often the world’s poorest who suffer and the vast majority of pollution-related deaths (92pc) occur in low- or middle-income developing countries. Environmental regulations in those countries tend to be weaker and industries lean on outdated technologies and dirtier fuels. In wealthier countries where overall pollution is not as rampant, it is still the poorest communities that are more often exposed, the report says.
“There is this myth that finance ministers still live by, that you have to let industry pollute or else you won’t develop, he said. “It just isn’t true,” says Richard Fuller, head of the global toxic watchdog Pure Earth and one of the 47 scientists, policymakers and public health experts who contributed to the 51-page report.
I cannot understand how some still don’t get that controlling pollution would also solve many other problems one of which is climate change!
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