More Than 95% of World's Population Breathing Unhealthy Air, Says New Report (cnn.com)

More than 95% of the world's population is breathing unhealthy air and the poorest nations are the hardest hit, a new report has found. From the report: According to the annual State of Global Air Report, published Tuesday by the Health Effects Institute (HEI), long-term exposure to air pollution contributed to an estimated 6.1 million deaths across the globe in 2016. The report says exposure to air pollution led to strokes, heart attacks, lung cancer and chronic lung disease, causing many of those premature deaths. It also says that air pollution is the fourth-highest cause of death among all health risks globally, coming in below high blood pressure, diet and smoking.

Comments

Where does one find the 5% breathing healthy air?

[bogaboga]

I am just wondering where to find those 5%. Any one with a clue?

Re:Where does one find the 5% breathing healthy ai

[muphin]

i dont think theres 365 million people in Australia :p

Re:Where does one find the 5% breathing healthy ai

[Bradac_55]

And yet the USA has currently the cleanest air since the industrial revolution.

The most common pollution

[cirby]

Aside from living in China (which is a nasty business by itself), a whole lot of folks get their "air pollution" by cooking over smoky wood fires in their houses, huts, or shacks.

As mentioned above, the US is currently pretty darned clean, air-wise. I remember watching the smog roll over the hills from L.A. to the High Desert in the early 1980s. It looked like an overdone special effect.

Re:The most common pollution

[110010001000]

The air may LOOK clean, but that doesn't mean it is. Just because you don't see smoke coming out of a tailpipe doesn't mean that there is no pollution.

Re:The most common pollution

[hey!]

The dramatic reduction in visble smog levels since the 1970s is mostly due to the elimination of pollutants that are invisible at the tailpipe. Stuff like NOx and sulfur oxides react with volatile organic compounds to produce the familiar brownish haze. Aerosolized particulates also aren't necessarily visible at the tailpipe but collected in the atmosphere they produce visible effects over long distances.

So while it's true that you can't see most of the bad stuff coming out of your tailpipe, you can certainly see the effect of everyone dumping those bad things into the air. The elimination of routine smog events in most of the country is a real regulatory achievement, but over half of Americans are not old enough to remember the status quo ante. It was, by modern standards, pretty awful.

Re:Where does one find the 5% breathing healthy ai

[orion205]

I am just wondering where to find those 5%. Any one with a clue?

Just look at the map on page 3 of the report.

It shows most of Africa, the Middle East, and southern Asia with the worst pollution. Countries at higher latitudes have much cleaner air. Canada, the United States (apart from the San Joaquin Valley and areas of the midwest), and large areas of Russia, Northern Europe, and Australia have pollution below the WHO guideline. Western Europe is pretty good, but Germany and northern France have particulate pollution higher than the guideline.

Re:Where does one find the 5% breathing healthy ai

[tomhath]

Peoples' health is suffering because business is basically transferring their costs onto the people...he people are burden with the poor health and in the US the outrageous medical bills.

Almost all of the US has clean air, except for the biggest cities. And the pollution there is primarily car exhaust, not businesses.

The biggest things people can do to reduce the cost of healthcare is to quit smoking, lose weight, and exercise.

Just because things used to be worse

[rsilvergun]

doesn't mean they are better now. I wish I could get more people to understand this.

Re:Just because things used to be worse

[Anonymous Coward]

No there is a definate limit to how good things can be. People have a need to struggle. If they are put in a world that is for all intents and purpose an Eden. They will inevitably start fighting with their fellow humans. They will start wars for perceived minor injustices perpetrated on their ancestors by another tribe due to a lack of complete equality. They will break into camps called democrats and republicans and spend all say on the internet complaining about how the world couild be more perfect if only the other guys were all dead.

Now on the other hand if the world were full of toxic gasses, and people were being killed regularly by tigers roaming the city, and a meteor stuck and wiped out a couple billion people, inevitably people would become brothers and join forces to fight the toxic smog, saber tooth tigers and meteors that were killing them.

So yes if you want to have people stop fighting each other you need to make to world less perfect. That is why I support global warming and think we should burn old tires to light the streets.

Re: Where does one find the 5% breathing healthy a

[BeaverCleaver]

"Life expectancy at birth." After the industrial revolution we got a lot better at treating illnesses that used to kill very young children, e.g. measles, polio, whooping cough. This skewed the statistic way up. Much more than people dying at 70 instead of 75 due to air pollution.

Re: Where does one find the 5% breathing healthy a

[Reverend Green]

Actually no.

Urban life expectancy declined precipitously during the industrial revolution. It turns out that horrible pollution, long hours in an unsafe factory environment, and grinding poverty are pretty bad for human health. Who knew?!

We owe our current (declining, if you're an American) life expectancy to two advances occurring well after the industrial revolution proper: urban sanitation (water & sewer) systems, and antibiotics.

Re:Where does one find the 5% breathing healthy ai

[war4peace]

Most rural areas, except where heavy industries reside; northern populations (Lapland, Iceland, parts of Siberia), lots of insular countries, etc.
Numbers add up.

Re:Global warming

[hcs_$reboot]

OTOH fixing global warming should have a positive impact on the air we breathe.

More than 95% of World's Population Breathing

[Anonymous Coward]

Coincidentally, this was the subject of a very worthwhile podcast from the BBC: "More or Less". As with all statistics, one has to understand what lies behind - how did "they" reach these numbers, what do they mean by unhealthy and who are "they" anyway? It turns out that "they" are WHO or some other reasonably reliable source; the numbers as such are sound as well, and what they are about is one pollutant: particulates, and the criterion for whether the air is healthy is an official guideline number: 10 (what? for the sake of the argument, let's 'particles per m^3', but it isn't essential for the discussion here). So unhealthy air would be an average of >10 units - if it is 12, as in some cities, it is counted as unhealthy, and if it is 150, it's the same, in this particular statistic, although I suspect we can all agree that 150 is a good worse than 12.

So, there is nothing wrong with the number, but one has to understand what it actually says; and unfortunately most news media have not bothered, but instead go on to explain how it shortens lifespans and make it hard to breathe - which is certainly true, as far as it goes. However, the effect is going to depend on exactly how bad the numbers are, and we also have to remember that what produces the pollution also in some cases contribute positively in other ways to people's health and quality of life: as an example, if London were to get rid of all motorised transport, it might add 30 days to people's life expectancy; on the other hand, that life expectancy now stands at somewhere in the 90es for millenials, mostly due to the technologies that pollute; how much would life expectancy go down, were we to abandon significant parts of technology? It is not a simple and straightforward decision to make.

Re:Where does one find the 5% breathing healthy ai

[Subm]

We exported many of our polluting industries to places that, lo and behold, now have poor air quality.

Re:Try to get rich people to pollute less

[Attila Dimedici]

Ummm, no the rich cannot make "trivial changes" to their lifestyle, or ANY changes to their lifestyle, which would reduce the pollution being talked about in this study by 90%. The overwhelming majority of particulate pollution is emitted by actions of the VERY poor (I am not blaming them for it, just stating a fact). The way to reduce particulate pollution, which is what this article is talking about, by a large amount is to improve the life of the poor so that they are not cooking their food and heating their homes with solid fuel (coal, wood, etc).

There are things done by the wealthy that could, and perhaps should, be eliminated which would reduce particulate pollution, but, on the world scale, only by a small amount.

Re:Global warming

[thegarbz]

Yet people are worried about Global Warming, while they choke on the air they breathe daily. Humans.

It'll blow your mind to know that something can cause two problems at once.

Re:Where does one find the 5% breathing healthy ai

[Ichijo]

Almost all of the US has clean air, except for the biggest cities. And the pollution there is primarily car exhaust, not businesses.

[Citation Needed] that shows that car exhaust is the main source of air pollution in cities and not truck exhaust, ship/train exhaust, power plants, or agricultural emissions.