Air pollution crisis set to claim lives in choked Asian cities

Air pollution crisis set to claim lives in choked Asian cities

Richard Ingham, Agence France-Presse, Paris

Asia's air pollution, already singled out this year for its effect on the environment, is set to reap a bitter harvest in human lives in decades to come, experts say.

Doctors armed with the latest evidence about the effects of airborne pollution on health say the megacities of China and India, with their traffic-choked streets and dependence on coal, could become centers of premature mortality.

Two studies published on Saturday in the British weekly The Lancet dramatically highlight the damage airborne soot and exhaust pollution wreak on human lungs and the heart.

An Irish study looked at the death rate in Dublin after the city authorities in 1990 outlawed the burning of coal, a fuel that had been reintroduced after the 1970s oil shock.

The ban slashed concentrations of black smoke in the air by 70 percent. In six years deaths from respiratory disease fell by 15 percent, and there was a 10-percent decline in cardiovascular disease.

A Dutch study, which monitored the health of 5,000 people from 1986-94, found that people who lived near a main road were twice as likely to die from heart and lung disease, and 40 percent likelier to die from any cause, compared with people who lived in low-pollution areas.

Specialists said the warning signs were clear for Indian and Chinese cities, where pollution levels can be several times those recorded in Ireland or the Netherlands.

"We've known for a long time that coal smog isn't good for you, to put it mildly," Bert Brunekreef, professor at the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences, Utrecht University, told AFP.

"To some extent, the urban areas in these countries are recreating the situation that we've had like in London in the past," he said, referring to the killer smogs of the 1950s that claimed the lives of thousands of Londoners.

Douglas Dockery, professor of environmental epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health, who co-authored the Dublin study, said the problem was that in China and India coal use is rampant and that, with growing prosperity, cars are now starting to flood the streets, many of them poorly maintained.

The world's two most populous countries are heading toward "the same mistakes we've made in the developed world," he said in an interview.

The problem is at its worst, he said, when coal is burned in homes, in inefficient burners that create little heat but generate particulate pollution -- carbon or dust particles that are breathed in and penetrate the lungs.

Problems of a somewhat different kind occur with traffic pollution, in that there is a bouquet of noxious or suffocating gases, as well as compounds that react with sunlight to form the oxygen molecule ozone, which irritates the airways and is dangerous for people with respiratory problems.

Cars also throw out fine-grained particulates, which because of their small size are able to penetrate deep into the lungs.

"When I was in Beijing maybe 10 or 15 years ago, it was coal pollution that was the big problem and four, five years ago, they had essentially banned the burning of coal within the city of Beijing, but there was this tremendous influx of cars, which has caused a pollution problem of equal magnitude," Dockery said.

"They're trading one bad technology against the other."

The United Nations Development Programme last November branded China as having some of filthiest urban air on the planet.

"China's major cities have been characterized by some of the highest levels of air pollution in the world often with pollutant concentrations at multiples of the levels considered safe for human health and the environment," the report, written in conjunction with several Chinese institutes, said.

Air pollution problems are not exclusive to Asia's big two, and smoke from illegal land clearances by Indonesian farmers this year have triggered health scares in Singapore and Malaysia.

The UN Environment Programme earlier this year said the soot from burning coal and biomass fuels had created a vast, sooty pall over South Asia that triggered regional climate change.