{"id":5280,"date":"2013-06-21T02:24:53","date_gmt":"2013-06-21T02:24:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/disnaija.com\/nigeria-news\/air-pollution-becomes-china-indias-migraine\/"},"modified":"2013-06-21T02:24:53","modified_gmt":"2013-06-21T02:24:53","slug":"air-pollution-becomes-china-indias-migraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/disnaija.com\/air-pollution-becomes-china-indias-migraine\/","title":{"rendered":"Air pollution becomes China, India\u2019s migraine"},"content":{"rendered":"
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PARIS (AFP) – Air pollution has become a curse for millions of city-dwellers in Asia, posing a mounting risk to the very young and very old, pregnant women and people with heart and respiratory problems, say experts.<\/p>\n
“The levels of pollution in parts of China, India and elsewhere in Asia are just astronomically high and the health impacts are dramatic,” said Bob O’Keefe of the Health Effects Institute (HEI), a US not-for-profit research agency.<\/p>\n
“This is a threat that was really under-estimated in the past,” said O’Keefe.<\/p>\n
This week, Singapore grappled with record levels of air pollution, unleashed by land fires in neighbouring Indonesia.<\/p>\n
In January, pollution in Beijing went off the scale of an air-quality monitor at the US embassy, and the city’s hospital admissions surged by 20 percent.<\/p>\n
In August 2012, Hong Kong suffered its highest-recorded pollution, prompting the territory to urge vulnerable population groups to stay indoors.<\/p>\n
HEI estimates, derived from an exceptionally detailed analysis called the Global Burden of Disease, say that some 3.2 million people around the world died prematurely from outdoor air pollution in 2010.<\/p>\n
China and India together accounted for some 2.5 million of these deaths, sharing the tally roughly equally.<\/p>\n
The death toll in China has risen by a third over 20 years, but worse pollution is only part of the reason. As China becomes more prosperous, its citizens are attaining greater ages, reaching 70 or 80 years or beyond — when people become more vulnerable to heart and respiratory stress from air pollution.<\/p>\n
A study published last August in the journal Nature Climate Change estimated that forest and land fires in Southeast Asia kill an additional 15,000 people annually from air pollution during the El Nino weather phenomenon, when drier soil often causes blazes to go out of control. (There is no El Nino at present.)<\/p>\n
An investigation by US researchers, published in February, found that among three million births recorded in nine countries in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia, there was a clear link between worse air pollution and lower birth weight. <\/p>\n