
Global pollution kills 9M a year, according to new study - ramonvillasante
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/19/global-pollution-kills-millions-threatens-survival-human-societies?CMP=share_btn_tw
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tomxor
STOP trying to ascribe an arbitrary death toll!!!

Pollution kills everyone by shortening or reducing quality of life, it's near
impossible to quantify, but what makes no sense at all is picking some
arbitrary threshold, everyone is affected not 9M not 1B, but 7B.

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mlinksva
It says premature deaths. I'm not sure it makes no sense at all, but it is an
unfortunate thing to focus on. DALYs seem better, and are discussed throughout
the article (which I've only skimmed so far), eg:

> The GBD study also estimates that disease caused by all forms of pollution
> was responsible for 268 million DALYs—254 million years of life lost and 14
> million years lived with disability. This information is available by
> country and region and is presented in the appendix.

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Retric
For comparison ~55.3 million people die each year so ~16% of deaths are linked
to pollution.

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TheSpiceIsLife
I didn't know this, guess I'd never thought to look it up.

If 16% of deaths can be attributed to pollution, and some percentage are
vehicle related, accidents in general, preventable disease / infections, etc
etc...

How many deaths per year should we expect if all of those things could be
reduced / minimised / eliminated?

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xapata
We might find other causes increase. For example, decreasing violent deaths
increases mortality from heart disease. After some lag time, of course.

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YokoZar
We surely would. But the gains may be more (or less) than you think.

I remember a gerontologist showing some math where if you prevented all heart
disease you'd only gain about 4 years of human lifespan (since most of those
people would soon get cancer); similarly if you prevented all cancer you'd
only get about 4 years as well (since most of those people would get heart
disease).

But if you prevented both, you'd get something north of 10 years of average
lifespan.

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valuearb
This would be far more useful if it’s measured in life years, than lives.
There is big difference between pollution killing an healthy infant then
killing a 86 year old suffering from a terminal illness.

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curiousgeorgio
No, sorry - this isn't science.

> air pollution was the biggest killer, leading to heart disease, stroke, lung
> cancer and other illnesses

There's absolutely no way you can definitively link deaths from heart disease
to air pollution with any substantial degree of confidence, at least not in
99.99% of the cases.

I guarantee that within a short amount of time, this whole "study" will be
invalidated as baseless political-motivated pseudoscience.

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tinco
There's a full text available here:

[http://www.thelancet.com/commissions/pollution-and-
health](http://www.thelancet.com/commissions/pollution-and-health)

Is the lancet politically motivated? I haven't heard about it before, but I am
not yet really well versed in the climate science field.

It says in the abstract: Diseases caused by pollution were responsible for an
estimated 9 million premature deaths in 2015—16% of all deaths worldwide—three
times more deaths than from AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined and 15
times more than from all wars and other forms of violence.

That's a pretty heavy claim to make, and it says it without any doubt. Perhaps
they can rule out all other causes of heart disease statistically? I don't
know what sort of things cause heart disease that they might not know about in
a population.

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cr1895
It's a leading medical journal that has been publishing since the 1800s.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lancet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lancet)

