Air Pollution Kills and when 652 cities based in 24 different countries were the data vantage points for an international team of researchers; this seemed truer than it sounds. These researchers who were correlated levels of particle pollution with the day to day mortality rates came to some conclusion that can be alarming. Microscopic particles – PM 2.5 and PM 10, which are the major contenders when Air Quality is concerned were taken into consideration as they enter the lungs and eventually the bloodstream quite easily.
Conducted in New England at the Journal of medicine, the study found out that as particulate matter increased, the excess of death increased too. Now that is not something new for people who have been working on trying to understand Air Pollution, but for the laymen, it might sound like an obscure thing.
The United State alone had a 0.79 percent increase in daily mortality rate with every 10 micrograms per cubic meter of PM 10 level rise. The figure increases by 1.58 percent when the same amount of PM 2.5 particles were taken into consideration. Putting it in general terms, 178 deaths could be sighted on a day when the levels of pollutants increase by these amounts.
The Environmental Protection Agency has set a three-year daily average o 12 micrograms of PM 2.5 and 15 micrograms of PM 10 for proper, well-built public health issues. These are not met in half of the cities that were cited as examples for this study. It is alarming to see that even moderate level of air pollution can be deadly for more than half of the world.
The co-author of the London School of Hygiene and Tropic Medicine Antonio Gasparrini recently said that the current U.S limits need to be lowered in order to reduce the number of deaths that are caused due to Air Pollution. He also noted that policymakers have to work on this calamity straight away because only churning and understanding number will not give us results of lower death rates.
