Every year, millions of people succumb to illnesses including cancer brought on by air pollution. The ambient air quality guidelines are the first line of defense against this carnage. Yet, according to McGill University experts, more than 50% of the world’s population does not have access to protection from appropriate air quality regulations.
Around the world, there are huge regional variations in air pollution. But what about the main tools used to combat it? In a study that was published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, researchers from McGill University set out to look at international air quality standards in an effort to find out the answers.
The researchers concentrated on PM2.5 air pollution, which is thought to cause 4.2 million preventable deaths annually worldwide. This includes over a million fatalities in China, over 500,000 in India, nearly 200,000 in Europe, and more than 50,000 in the US.
According to estimates from Health Canada, air pollution causes roughly 5,900 deaths annually in Canada. According to co-author Parisa Ariya, a professor in the department of chemistry at McGill University, “air pollution kills almost as many Canadians every three years as COVID-19 has killed to date.
little but lethal
PM2.5 is the form of air pollution that causes the most fatalities worldwide. It is made up of particles that are less than 2.5 microns, which are so tiny that a red blood cell may hold billions of them.
Yevgen Nazarenko, a Research Associate at McGill University who conducted the study with Devendra Pal under the direction of Professor Ariya, claims that although “we adopted unprecedented measures to protect people from COVID-19, we don’t do enough to avoid the millions of preventable deaths caused by air pollution every year.”
Where there is protection, the criteria, according to the researchers, are frequently significantly lower than what the World Health Organization deems safe. Many of the most polluted areas, like the Middle East, don’t even measure PM2.5 levels. Additionally, they discovered that the most lax air quality regulations are frequently broken, particularly in China and India. In contrast, the highest criteria are frequently met in nations like Australia and Canada.
Surprisingly, the researchers found that effective air pollution control is not always hampered by high human density. The establishment and enforcement of tight rules have been successful in a number of countries with dense populations. These included the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Trinidad & Tobago, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore.
According to our research, there is an urgent need for sufficient PM2.5 ambient air quality guidelines to safeguard more than half of the world’s population. These norms should be implemented globally to save many lives. And in cases when standards are already in existence, they ought to be standardized everywhere, according to Nazarenko.
He claims that in order to save hundreds of thousands of lives annually, we must work more to clean up our air even in rich nations.
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