The most comprehensive report to date on the health effects of environmental pollution shows that filthy air, contaminated water and other polluted parts of our environment kill more people worldwide each year than almost everything else combined – smoking, hunger, natural disasters, war, murder, AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
It’s no wonder then that the number of contaminated water-related deaths in Puerto Rico is expected to climb into the thousands.
In addition to the human tragedy, this pollution costs us well over $4 trillion in annual losses, or 6% of global GDP, the study published by the The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health and reproduced by Forbes, said.
The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health has among its authors a Nigerian, Olusoji Adeyi, who is currently the Director of the Health, Nutrition and Population Global Practice at the World Bank Group.
According to the study, 9 million people every year, one in every six premature deaths, are caused by diseases from toxic exposures in the environment. That’s 20 times more than all wars. Dr. Philip Landrigan, Dean of Global Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the lead author of the report, noted, ‘There's been a lot of study of pollution, but it's never received the resources or level of attention as, say, AIDS or climate change’.
China knows this better than any other country. Over 300,000 people die each year from toxic emissions coming out of coal-fired power plants alone. And silica manufacturing and waste from computer chip and solar array manufacturing is a growing health problem.
In fact, poor countries in South Asia and in Africa sustain the majority of these pollution deaths. In many of these countries, especially India, pollution causes a fourth of all deaths, putting a huge burden on their developing economies. Even indoor burning of biomass in poor countries has become a global health epidemic.
But these same poor countries will never get out of poverty without increasing the very industries that cause this pollution – energy, manufacturing, mining, etc. Since it takes about 3,000 kWhs per person per year to have what we consider a good like – to get into the middle class – the only way to eradicate global poverty is to get these poor countries a lot more energy.
This concept is embodied in the United Nations Human Development Index, or HDI, that states the most important requirement for a good life is access to energy.
However, there are a lot more pollution health effects beyond actual death, and several studies have attempted to quantify those costs - costs that include lost work days, hospital visits, disability, prescription drugs and all the costs associated with illness in addition to death.
Read more: Forbes/The Lancet Article
