Polluted Air Can Cut Lives By An Average Of 3 Years

Long-term exposure to polluted air can lead to several health consequences including asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, decreased lung function and even cancer. A new study pointed out that air pollution decreased life expectancy and was associated with premature death.

According to the new study in cardiovascular research, air pollution, mainly from burning fossil fuels is found to reduce life expectancy globally by an average of about three years. The impact is found to be greater than that of smoking, HIV/AIDS, vector-borne diseases and violence.

The researchers examined global mortality data from 2015 and suggested that air pollution led to 8.8 million premature deaths, which translated to an average shortening of people’s lives by 2.9 years.

The key findings of the study:

• Residents of East-Asia were found to be the most affected with a 3.9 years reduction in life expectancy
• Those living in Australia experienced the least damage, lost 0.8 years
• People living in North America lost 1.4 years due to air pollution
• Smoking was responsible for 7.2 million premature deaths in 2015 and shortened lives by only 2.2 years
• HIV/AIDS reduced life expectancy by 0.7 years
• Diseases like malaria reduced life expectancies by 0.6 years
• War and violence cut life expectancy by about 0.3 years only

“Since the impact of air pollution on public health overall is much larger than expected, and is a worldwide phenomenon, we believe our results show there is an 'air pollution pandemic,” Inside Climate News quoted Dr. Thomas Münzel, a cardiologist at the University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and an author on the study. "Policymakers and the medical community should be paying much more attention to this. Both air pollution and smoking are preventable, but over the past decades much less attention has been paid to air pollution than to smoking, especially among cardiologists," he said.

The findings of this study demonstrated that air pollution poses a vast level of threat to human lives. The study also highlighted older adults are more vulnerable to premature death due to air pollution and children younger than 5 years old in South Asia and Africa are more prone to death due to lower respiratory infections.