Breathing in polluted air can kill in the same way as smoking tobacco - both factors kill 7 million people worldwide every year. But while the world succeeds in the war on tobacco, the air pollution situation is rapidly deteriorating.
Breathing in polluted air can kill in the same way as smoking tobacco - both factors kill 7 million people worldwide every year. But while the world succeeds in the war on tobacco, the air pollution situation is rapidly deteriorating.
The Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) hopes to reverse this trend.
“The world has managed to corner tobacco,” Tedros Adanom Ghebreyssus wrote in a statement published in The Guardian on Saturday. "Now we need to do the same with 'new tobacco' - the toxic air that billions of people breathe every day."
Taking action
According to the WHO, nine out of ten people in the world breathe polluted air.
The organization is hosting the first Global Conference on Air Pollution and Health this week, and Gebreisus hopes that world leaders can use the event to take action to reduce air pollution in their countries.
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“Given the overwhelming evidence of poor air conditions, we need urgent policy solutions to scale up investment and accelerate practical action to reduce air pollution,” he wrote, noting that this could be in the form of tightening air quality standards, increasing the availability of clean energy, or increasing investment in green technologies.
Risk reduction
Efforts to combat air pollution, which can have public health implications, cannot be overemphasized.
“No one, rich or poor, can avoid the problem of air pollution. A clean and healthy environment is the single most important factor in ensuring good health,”wrote Gebreyssus in his article for The Guardian. "By cleaning the air we breathe, we can prevent or at least reduce some of the biggest health risks."
The conference ends on Thursday, so we won't have to wait long to see which countries draw conclusions or, conversely, ignore the WHO's call to action.
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