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Improving air quality worldwide may significantly reduce pollution-related deaths

Implementing the World Health Organization’s particulate air quality guidelines across the globe could prevent more than 2 million deaths per year associated with air pollution, according to study results.

“We wanted to determine how much cleaner different parts of the world would need to be in order to substantially reduce death from particulate matter,” Joshua S. Apte, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a press release. “We believe our model could help in designing strategies to protect public health.”

Apte and colleagues obtained age-specific mortality data and population age structures from 2010 from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation for 21 international regions. The dataset provides researchers with age- and cause-specific mortality data for ischemic heart disease, stroke, COPD, lung cancer and acute respiratory lung infection. The researchers then considered how future changes in demographics and disease rates would affect mortality associated with particulate matter using WHO projections of population and cause- and age-specific mortality for 10 global regions in 2030.

Using public data and methods similar to the Global Burden of Disease 2010 assessment, the researchers’ model estimated 3.24 million people worldwide died prematurely because of particulate matter in 2010.

The researchers noted that limiting global maximum particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns to the WHO target levels in countries like China and India could prevent 1.4 million premature deaths annually. Additional measures met globally, even in areas with cleaner air, may prevent approximately 2.1 million premature deaths.

“We were surprised to find the importance of cleaning air not just in the dirtiest parts of the world — which we expected to find — but also in cleaner environments like the U.S., Canada and Europe,” Julian D. Marshall, PhD, associate professor of environmental engineering at the University of Minnesota, said in the release. – by Ryan McDonald

Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.