India among worst hit as pollution gets deadlier than wars, AIDS: Report

“Pollution is the largest environmental cause of disease and premature death in the world today. Diseases caused by pollution were responsible for an estimated 9 million premature deaths in 2015,” the study released on Thursday in The Lancet medical journal noted. 

The study, the first to put together data on disease and death caused by all forms of pollution combined, said 16 per cent of all deaths worldwide were attributable to the environmental pollution.

This figure is three times more than the deaths from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined and 15 times more than from all wars and other forms of violence. It is also one-and-a-half times higher than the number of people killed by smoking and over six times the number of people dying in road accidents. In the most severely affected countries, pollution-related disease are responsible for more than one death in four, it said. “In 2015, the greatest numbers of deaths due to pollution occurred in Southeast Asia (3·2 million) and the western Pacific (2·2 million). 

Southeast Asia includes India and the western Pacific region includes China,” said the study. Epidemiologist Philip Landrigan, dean of global health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and the lead author on the report said pollution has never received the desired attention of world leaders, civil society and health professionals. 

“There’s been a lot of study of pollution, but it has never received the resources or level of attention as, say, Aids or climate change,” Landrigan said. 

“Although more than 70 per cent of the diseases caused by pollution are non-communicable diseases, interventions against pollution are barely mentioned in the Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Non-Communicable Diseases.” Stating that several cities in India and China had recorded alarming annual concentrations of PM2·5 pollution, the study said over 50 per cent of global deaths due to air pollution in 2015 occurred in India and China. 

“Air pollution in rapidly expanding mega-cities such as New Delhi and Beijing attracts the greatest public attention. However, WHO finds that 98 per cent of urban areas in developing countries with populations of more than 100,000 people fail to meet the global air quality guideline annually.”