Toxic smog chokes Indian capital of New Delhi

chicagotribune.com - As thick smog crept over India's capital this past week and smudged landmarks from view, Nikunj Pandey could feel his eyes and throat burning.

Pandey stopped doing his regular workouts and said he felt tightness in his lungs. He started wearing a triple layer of pollution masks over his mouth. And he became angry that he couldn't safely breathe the air.

"This is a basic right," he said. "A basic right of humanity."

Pandey is among many people in New Delhi who have become more aware of the toxic air in recent years and are increasingly frustrated at the lack of meaningful action by authorities.

This past week the air was the worst it's been all year in the capital, with microscopic particles that can affect breathing and health spiking to 75 times the level considered safe by the World Health Organization.

Experts have compared breathing the air to smoking a couple of packs of cigarettes a day. The Lancet medical journal recently estimated that some 2.5 million Indians die each year from pollution.

United Airlines suspended its flights between New Delhi and Newark, New Jersey, for Saturday and Sunday because of the heavy air pollution in the Indian capital, said Sonia, an airline official who uses one name.

Pandey said the millions of rural folk who have moved to the city understand the problem better than they once did, and are trying everything from tying scarves over their faces to eating "jaggery," a sugar cane product that some people believe offers a range of health benefits.


Masks once considered an affectation of hypochondriac tourists are these days routinely worn by government workers and regular people on the street.

Volunteers handed out thousands of green surgical masks this week to make a point about the pollution, but such masks likely have a limited impact on keeping out the tiny particles from people's lungs.

"This is truly a health emergency," said Anumita Roychowdhury, the executive director of research and advocacy at New Delhi's Centre for Science and Environment.

She said doctors in recent days have been dealing with a 20 percent spike in emergency hospital admissions from people suffering heart and lung problems. And that's in a city, she said, where one in every three children already has compromised lungs.

Seema Upadhyaya, who heads a primary school, said she has never before witnessed so many children suffering from respiratory illnesses as she has this year. That has prompted changes to the curriculum.

"It's impacting everybody," she said.

Authorities have been taking extraordinary measures to try to mitigate the immediate crisis. They have temporarily closed schools and stopped most trucks from entering the city.

The government put off a decision for rationing car usage starting Monday as pollution levels started coming down in the city, said Kailash Gahlot, New Delhi's transport minister.

But everyone agrees such measures don't address the root causes, which remain hard to solve. (ontinueReading

Thousands of cars banned from roads as Mexico City chokes in longest pollution alert for two decades

yahoonews - Authorities in Mexico City have ordered cars off the streets and warned people about exercising outdoors as sprawling metropolis chokes in its worst smog for nearly two decades.

Hundreds of thousands of less efficient vehicles have been banned from the roads in the Mexican capital, where a pollution alert has been in place since Monday.

Ozone levels topped the 150-point threshold that typically triggers a smog alert for the following day again on Friday.

The last time the stage 1 warning remained in place for five days was May 1998, although back then alerts were triggered at 200 points.

The stage 1 alert has doubled the number of vehicles not allowed to drive in the sprawling metropolis on a given day and place additional emissions requirements on factories.

Children, elderly people, pregnant women, and people with respiratory and cardiovascular problems are urged to stay indoors between 1pm and 7 pm.

Authorities have also warned people about strenuous activities outdoors as the city is engulfed in murky skies.

According to government air quality records, in March and April 1992 the city experienced 20 consecutive smog alert days. (ontinueReading

Polluted environments kill 1.7 million children each year, UN health agency reports

6 March 2017 – Unhealthy environments are responsible for one-quarter of young child deaths, according to two new reports from the United Nations health agency, which reviewed the threats from pollutants such as second-hand smoke, UV radiation, unsafe water and e-waste.

According to the latest information, polluted environments take the lives of 1.7 million children under the age of five.

“A polluted environment is a deadly one – particularly for young children,” said Margaret Chan, Director-General of the UN World Health Organization (WHO). “Their developing organs and immune systems, and smaller bodies and airways, make them especially vulnerable to dirty air and water.”

In one of the two reports, Inheriting a Sustainable World: Atlas on Children's Health and the Environment , WHO announced that many of the common causes of death among children aged between one month and five years of age are preventable with safe water and clear cooking fuels. These include diarrhoea, malaria and pneumonia.

The main pollutant is in the air, resulting in 570,000 deaths each year among children under five years old. Air pollution can stunt brain development and reduce lung function and trigger asthma. In the longer-term, exposure to air pollution can increase the child's risk of contracting heart disease, a stroke or cancer.

To counter such exposure, WHO recommends reducing air pollution, improving safe water and sanitation, and protecting pregnant women and building safer environments, among other actions described in Don't pollute my future! The impact of the environment on children's health .

“Investing in the removal of environmental risks to health, such as improving water quality or using cleaner fuels, will result in massive health benefits,” said Maria Neira, WHO Director, Department of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health.

One of the emerging environmental threats to children is electronic and electrical waste, according to the second WHO report. Appliances such as old mobile phones that are improperly recycled “expose children to toxins which can lead to reduced intelligence, attention deficit, lung damage, and cancer,” the UN agency reported.

At the current rate, the amount of such waste is expected to increase by 19 per cent between 2014 and 2018, up to 50 million metric tonnes.

The reports also point out harmful chemicals that work themselves through the food chain – such as fluoride, lead and mercury, as well as the impact that climate change and UV rays have on children's development. (ontinueReading

China, India account for half world's pollution deaths in 2015: study

Reuters - China and India accounted for more than half of the total number of global deaths attributable to air pollution in 2015, researchers said in a study published on Tuesday.

The U.S.-based Health Effects Institute (HEI) found that air pollution caused more than 4.2 million early deaths worldwide in 2015, making it the fifth highest cause of death, with about 2.2 million deaths in China and India.

The institute's study, the first of its kind, was based on the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project, a database backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that tracks the role that behavioral, dietary and environmental factors play in deaths across 195 countries.

New evidence and methodologies mean that the estimate is significantly higher than the figure published by the World Health Organization last year, which put the number of global air pollution-related deaths in 2012 at 3 million, HEI said.

The institute, which has also launched an online database showing the global impact of pollution on health (www.stateofglobalair.org), said 92 percent of the world's population lives in areas with unhealthy air.

Air pollution has been linked to higher rates of cancer, stroke and heart disease, as well as chronic respiratory conditions such as asthma.

China and India, the world's two most populous countries, each accounted for 1.1 million deaths, the findings showed, but China is pushing ahead when it comes to taking action, HEI president Dan Greenbaum told Reuters.

"(India) has got a longer way to go, and they still appear to have some ministers who say there is not a strong connection between air pollution and mortality in spite of quite a lot of evidence," he said.

A spokesman for India's environment ministry could not be reached for comment, but minister Anil Madhav Dave said last week that "there is no conclusive data available" on the link between pollution and mortality, media reported.

China's environment ministry did not respond to a request to comment on whether the estimate of 1.1 million deaths was accurate.

Though China has launched a campaign to improve air quality, authorities have been reluctant to draw direct links between air pollution and mortality, with the health ministry saying it had "no data" linking smog to higher incidences of cancer.

"It is currently too early to draw conclusions about the extent of the impact of smog on health, especially its long-term impact on the body," a ministry spokesman told media during a press briefing in January.

In a long-term national healthcare plan published last October, the government acknowledged the link between health and pollution, and pledged to assess the precise impacts as well as boost environmental monitoring capabilities. (ontinueReading

2 billion children breathe toxic air worldwide, UNICEF says

NEW DELHI (AP) — As Indians awoke Monday to smoke-filled skies from a weekend of festival fireworks, New Delhi's worst season for air pollution began — with dire consequences.

A new report from UNICEF says about a third of the 2 billion children in the world who are breathing toxic air live in northern India and neighboring countries, risking serious health effects including damage to their lungs, brains and other organs. Of that global total, 300 million kids are exposed to pollution levels more than six times higher than standards set by the World Health Organization, including 220 million in South Asia.

For the Indian capital, the alarming numbers are hardly a surprise. New Delhi's air pollution, among the world's worst, spikes every winter because of the season's weak winds and countless garbage fires set alight to help people stay warm.

Even days before the city erupted in annual fireworks celebrations for the Hindu holiday of Diwali, recorded levels of tiny, lung-clogging particulate matter known as PM 2.5 were considered dangerous Friday at well above 300 micrograms per cubic meter. By Monday morning, the city was recording PM 2.5 levels above 900 mcg per cubic meter — more than 90 times higher than the WHO recommendation of no more than 10 mcg per cubic meter.

"My eyes are irritated, I'm coughing and I find it difficult to breathe," said 18-year-old Delhi student Dharmendra, who uses only one name as is common in India. Because of the pollution, "I don't go out so much nowadays."

New Delhi residents were advised to stay indoors on Monday, with health warnings issued for the young, elderly and those with respiratory or heart conditions. Officials said the high pollution levels were made worse by the ongoing burning of spent crops in agricultural fields in the neighboring states of Punjab and Haryana.

"Pollution levels every winter gallop, and we are already beginning to see the signs of it," said Anumita Roy Chowdhury, executive director of the Centre for Science and Environment, a Delhi-based research and lobbying organization. Some local studies indicate up to a third of Delhi's children have impaired lung function and respiratory diseases like asthma, she said. "This really signals health disaster."

Children face much higher health risks from air pollution than adults. Children breathe twice as quickly, taking in more air in relation to their body weight, while their brains and immune systems are still developing and vulnerable.

"The impact is commensurately shocking," with 600,000 children younger than 5 across the world dying every year from air pollution-related diseases, UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake said in the report released Monday. "Millions more suffer from respiratory diseases that diminish their resilience and affect their physical and cognitive development.

Counting 2 billion children breathing unhealthy air — out of a total 2.26 billion world population of children — means the vast majority are being exposed to levels of pollution considered by the WHO to be unsafe.

Out of that 2 billion breathing toxic air, the report puts 620 million of them in South Asia — mostly northern India. Another 520 million children are breathing toxic air in Africa, and 450 million in East Asia, mainly China, according to the report, which combined satellite images of pollution and ground data with demographic patterns to determine which populations fell into the highest risk areas.

Since being identified as one of the world's most polluted cities in recent years, New Delhi has tried to clean its air. It has barred cargo trucks from city streets, required drivers to buy newer cars that meet higher emissions standards and carried out several weeks of experimental traffic control, limiting the number of cars on the road. But other pollution sources, including construction dust and cooking fires fueled by wood or kerosene, continue unabated.

Last week, the city launched a smartphone application called "Change the Air" inviting residents to send photos and complaints about illegal pollution sources, from the burning of leaves and garbage in public parks to construction crews working without dust control measures.