MCLC: pollution linked to premature deaths

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: pollution linked to premature deaths
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Source: NYT (4/1/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/world/asia/air-pollution-linked-to-1-2-mi
llion-deaths-in-china.html

Air Pollution Linked to 1.2 Million Premature Deaths in China
By EDWARD WONG

BEIJING — Outdoor air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature
deaths in China in 2010, nearly 40 percent of the global total, according
to a new summary of data from a scientific study on leading causes of
death worldwide.

Figured another way, the researchers said, China’s toll from pollution was
the loss of 25 million healthy years of life from the population.

The data on which the analysis is based was first presented in the
ambitious 2010 Global Burden of Disease Study
<http://www.thelancet.com/themed/global-burden-of-disease>, which was
published in December in The Lancet, a British medical journal. The
authors decided to break out numbers for specific countries and present
the findings at international conferences. The China statistics were
offered at a forum in Beijing on Sunday.

“We have been rolling out the India- and China-specific numbers, as they
speak more directly to national leaders than regional numbers,” said
Robert O’Keefe, the vice president of the Health Effects Institute
<http://www.healtheffects.org/>, a research organization that is helping
to present the study. The organization is partly financed by the United
States Environmental Protection Agency and the global motor vehicle
industry.

What the researchers called “ambient particulate matter pollution” was the
fourth-leading risk factor for deaths in China in 2010, behind dietary
risks, high blood pressure and smoking. Air pollution ranked seventh on
the worldwide list of risk factors, contributing to 3.2 million deaths in
2010.

By comparison with China, India, which also has densely populated cities
grappling with similar levels of pollution, had 620,000 premature deaths
in 2010 because of outdoor air pollution, the study found. That was deemed
to be the sixth most common killer in South Asia.

The study was led by an institute at the University of Washington and
several partner universities and institutions, including the World Health
Organization.

Calculations of premature deaths because of outdoor air pollution are
politically threatening in the eyes of some Chinese officials. According
to news reports, Chinese officials cut out sections of a 2007 report
called “Cost of Pollution in China” that discussed premature deaths. The
report’s authors had concluded that 350,000 to 400,000 people die
prematurely in China each year because of outdoor air pollution. The study
was done by the World Bank in cooperation with the Chinese State
Environmental Protection Administration, the precursor to the Ministry of
Environmental Protection <http://english.mep.gov.cn/>.

There have been other estimates of premature deaths because of air
pollution. In 2011, the World Health Organization estimated that there
were 1.3 million premature deaths in cities worldwide because of outdoor
air pollution.

Last month, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,
based in Paris, warned that “urban air pollution is set to become the top
environmental cause of mortality worldwide by 2050, ahead of dirty water
and lack of sanitation.” It estimated that up to 3.6 million people could
end up dying prematurely from air pollution each year, mostly in China and
India.

There has been growing outrage in Chinese cities over what many say are
untenable levels of air pollution. Cities across the north hit record
levels in January, and official Chinese newspapers ran front-page articles
on the surge — what some foreigners call the “airpocalypse” — despite
earlier limits on such discussion by propaganda officials.

In February, the State Council, China’s cabinet, announced a timeline for
introducing new fuel standards, but state-owned oil and power companies
are known to block or ignore environmental policies to save on costs.

A study 
<http://www.ipe.org.cn/Upload/file/Notices/Reports/From-Bottleneck-to-Break
through-PITI-Evaluation-Results-Press-Release-March-28-2013-EN.pdf>
released on Thursday said the growth rate of disclosure of pollution
information in 113 Chinese cities had slowed. The groups doing the study,
the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, based in Beijing, and
the Natural Resources Defense Council <http://www.nrdc.org/>, based in
Washington, said that “faced with the current situation of severe air,
water and soil pollution, we must make changes to pollution source
information disclosure so that information is no longer patchy, out of
date and difficult to obtain.”

Chinese officials have made some progress in disclosing crucial air
pollution statistics. Official news reports have said 74 cities are now
required to release data on levels of particulate matter 2.5 micrometers
in diameter or smaller, which penetrate the body’s tissues most deeply.
For years, Chinese officials had been collecting the data but refusing to
release it, until they came under pressure from Chinese who saw that the
United States Embassy in Beijing was measuring the levels hourly and
posting the data in a Twitter feed, at BeijingAir
<https://twitter.com/BeijingAir>.

Last week, an official Chinese news report said the cost of environmental
degradation in China was about $230 billion
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/30/world/asia/cost-of-environmental-degrada
tion-in-china-is-growing.html> in 2010, or 3.5 percent of the gross
domestic product. The estimate, said to be partial, came from a research
institute under the Ministry of Environmental Protection, and was three
times the amount in 2004, in local currency terms. It was unclear to what
extent those numbers took into account the costs of health care and
premature deaths because of pollution.