More Than 95% of World's Population Breathing Unhealthy Air, Says New Report (cnn.com) 93
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.
Where does one find the 5% breathing healthy air? (Score:4, Interesting)
I am just wondering where to find those 5%. Any one with a clue?
Re: (Score:1)
Southern Australians?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Most rural areas, except where heavy industries reside; northern populations (Lapland, Iceland, parts of Siberia), lots of insular countries, etc.
Numbers add up.
Burt (Score:2)
If Burt is in the elevator in the morning for the trip up, we are definitely breathing dirty air.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
And yet the USA has currently the cleanest air since the industrial revolution.
Re: (Score:1)
And yet the USA has currently the cleanest air since the industrial revolution.
That's a pretty low bar. It'll be wonderful if we could stop burning shit and emitting shit.
Peoples' health is suffering because business is basically transferring their costs onto the people. Why clean up their emissions when they can just spew it into the air and when regulation is mentioned just scream, "The costs to us! And jobs will be lost!"
And in the meantime, the people are burden with the poor health and in the US the outrageous medical bills.
Privatize the profits; socialize the costs.
Re: Where does one find the 5% breathing healthy a (Score:3)
"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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
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.
... and antiseptics.
It is a common misunderstanding that a life expectancy of e.g. 35 years implies that most people die around that age, and e.g. sexagenarians are extremely rare. In reality, people in e.g. the Middle Ages regularly reached "old age" as well. That is: if they survived birth and infancy. Child mortality and childbed fever (killing the mother) used to be very high until Ignace Semmelweiss introduced hand disinfection before assisting in childbirth. At that time, it was not uncommon for doct
Re: (Score:1)
They are dying because of old age and the limits of the human body.
Yep. 6.1million people in 2016 found the limits of toxic substances inhaled from the air which their bodies were capable of.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
[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 [gizmodo.com].
Just because things used to be worse (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
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 i
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Where does one find the 5% breathing healthy ai (Score:4, Insightful)
We exported many of our polluting industries to places that, lo and behold, now have poor air quality.
Re: (Score:2)
But that#s not a concern - only poor voters are likely to die in any significant numbers.
Re:Where does one find the 5% breathing healthy ai (Score:5, Informative)
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 [stateofglobalair.org].
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: (Score:1)
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 [stateofglobalair.org]. 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.
You got modded down for describing the map, and accurately answering the guy's question? Funky.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe 5% of the world's population is just holding their breath?
Re: (Score:2)
Well, since TFA says 95% of them are in poor countries, that suggests the 5% are in places like the USA and EU mostly.
Of course, TFA also says there were ~54 million deaths of all causes worldwide in 2015. Which is consistent with an average life expectancy of 140-odd....
Re: (Score:2)
Rich people's estates (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
International Space Station
Re: (Score:2)
The most common pollution (Score:3)
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: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
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 cert
Re: (Score:2)
The US *is* doing well, recent efforts to the contrary notwithstanding. Yet without also convincing the rest of the world to put pollution controls in place, we're still being affected. Air pollution doesn't just stop at border crossings. At current levels, this stuff is circulating the globe in harmful quantities.. There's virtually nowhere in the Continental US with an AQI below 20 most times of the year.
I am currently living in a country that is *not* doing well, where AQI reaches over 400 on a weekly
In a rural setting yes (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Wouldn't the cars that are actually driving be putting out more of the pollutants than the idling ones? Idling is a relatively low-consumption state.
Re:Global warming (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
OTOH fixing global warming should have a positive impact on the air we breathe.
Both problems have the same fix, more trees. They both sequester carbon and filter air.
Re: (Score:3)
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: (Score:2)
I can't think off-hand of any chemicals used in Victorian Britain (and before) which produced the sort of heritable genetic changes you're looking for. People had certainly noticed that some diseases "run in families", but examples that lead to the association of certa
Re: (Score:1)
Make a car journey of at least 10 hours with 2 vegetarians, in winter, with the windows up. All will be revealed. No exam needed.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The maps are just estimates, coloured for effect, not accuracy.
Where's the warning? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There are legions of skywriters paid to continually re-draw the prop 65 warning in the air.
Re: (Score:2)
Which is so odd (Score:1)
cause it is so easy to breath in a healthy way; you breath in, then out, and repeat the process....
I apologize already (Score:2)
All RIGHT.
So I farted.
Sorry! (Geez..)
More than 95% of World's Population Breathing (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
That's me (Score:2)
Try to get rich people to pollute less (Score:2, Insightful)
Now try getting an American or rich person to fly less, turn down the heating in the winter or cooling in the summer, or buy less manufactured useless stuff.
Trivial changes that could reduce our pollution 90% without lowering anyone's quality of life are looked at as, "What do you want us to return to the stone age and live in caves?" as if riding a bike to work or wearing a sweater indoors in the winter undid all of human civilization.
Everyone reading these words, including you, can do things today, here,
Re:Try to get rich people to pollute less (Score:4)
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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you look at the map in TFA, the worst air isn't in rich people's countries. It coincides with parts of the world where burning down forests, coal generated power, indoor cooking over open fires and huge cites full of 2-cycle scooters are the norm. And smoking. So it's a third world problem that the third world has to step up and solve.
Cancer (Score:2)