Dirty environments - from smog in the air to chemicals in the water - are killing 15 times more people than all the wars and violence in the world. Also, pollution cannot be compared to smoking, hunger, natural disasters, road accidents, and even diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, which all together claim 3 times fewer lives. This is stated in a report on the results of a study of the relationship between pollution and health, conducted by the journal Lancet.
Every 6th premature death in 2015, that is, about 9 million, was due to toxic effects. In countries with the most unfavorable conditions, their share is even higher: in India - about a quarter (2.5 million deaths in 2015), in China - about a fifth (1.8 million). Financial losses are estimated at $ 4.6 trillion, which is approximately 6.2% of the global economy.
“There has been a lot of research into pollution, but never as much resources as HIV or climate change has ever been allocated,” says co-author epidemiologist Philip Landrigan of the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai Medical Center.
The authors call the data preliminary, and the number of deaths in 9 million - the lower limit. This is due to the fact that in some regions of sub-Saharan Africa, air monitoring systems have not even been installed, soil pollution is poorly studied, and less than half of about 5 thousand substances that en masse entering the environment since the 1950s have not been studied for negative impact on humans. The largest number of people who suffer from pollution live in Asia and Africa. India turned out to be the most unfavorable in this sense.