According to a report recently published by Unicef ‘A Breath of Toxic Air’, more than 4.5 million children – almost a third of under-18s – in the UK are growing up in areas with toxic levels of small particulate air pollution, including 1.6 million under-fives and 270,000 babies. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that […]
The European Commission recently published a paper to accompany its decisions on improving air quality, titled ‘A Europe that protects: Clean air for all’. “Air pollution is a cause of both chronic and serious diseases such as asthma, cardiovascular problems and lung cancer,” the paper said. But is the commission’s policy actually leading to clean air […]
Some pupils in London are being taught in classrooms where air is so polluted it breaches World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines, a study has found. In some cases, the report found that pollution levels inside the schools were higher than outside. Sadiq Khan wants the funds to allow schools to make “immediate changes”. A review […]
A decade-long Canadian study of 6.6 million people, published in The Lancet, found that 1 in 10 dementia deaths in people living within 50 metres of a busy road was attributable to traffic fumes and noise. The team tracked adults aged between 20 and 85 living in Ontario from 2001 to 2012 and over the study […]
According to the EEA’s Air quality in Europe – 2016 report, 467,000 people died prematurely in 2013 due to air pollution. With over 430,000 due to PM2.5 and 71,000 from NO2 (there is a certain level of cross over). In the UK, air pollution overall costs the economy more than £20bn per year – just under 16% of […]
A report conducted jointly by the World Bank and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2016 concluded that premature deaths due to air pollution are costing the global economy $5.1tn annually. This is roughly twice the economic output of the UK, with more than half of […]
The study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined brain tissue from 37 people in Manchester and Mexico, aged between 3 and 92. Abundant particles of magnetite, an iron oxide toxic to the brain, was found in the tissue and abnormal accumulation of these brain metals is a key feature of Alzheimer’s […]
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in the first major attempt to calculate both the human and financial cost, found that air pollution causes 712,000 premature deaths a year in Africa and costing £364bn. This premature death figure is compared to approximately 542,000 from unsafe water, 275,000 from malnutrition and 391,000 from unsafe sanitation. This could […]
London’s air pollution problem is still far from solved. Progress has been made on some pollutants, for example levels of carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide in London have dropped by 80% since 1996. There has been some progress in reducing PM and NO2 pollution, but levels still remain high. Analysis by Policy Exchange of data […]
Nine out of 10 people on the planet breath polluted air, even outdoors, the World Health Organisation stated in 2016. Around three million deaths every year are linked to outdoor air pollution and the south-east Asia and western Pacific regions account for nearly two out of every three such deaths.