Silent Killer: Air pollution kills 7 million yearly

An average person takes 16 breaths per minute. This means 960 breaths per hour, 21,600 breaths in a day, and 672,768,000 breaths in a lifetime (granted a person lives for 80 years).

Now imagine with every breath, you inhale particulate matter in polluted air that infiltrates deep into your lungs. This happens to 9 out of 10 people globally.

Air Pollution can be broken into 2 parts:

• Outdoor Air Pollution

• Indoor Air Pollution

Outdoor Air Pollution

Outdoor Air pollution is the contamination of outdoor air primarily due to automobile emissions, industrial exhaust, and forest fires. Around 99% of the world’s population live in places where air quality levels exceed World Health Organization (WHO) limits. Smog around cities has become a year-round affair in cities like Delhi, Beijing, Lahore, and Dhaka. Over 4.2M deaths annually occur globally primarily in South East Asia (concentrated in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) and China due to stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, lung cancer, acute and chronic respiratory diseases

Indoor Air Pollution

Cooking is the leading cause of indoor air pollution.

The majority of this is due to burning biomass (wood, animal dung, crop waste), coal, or kerosene in open stoves. Around 2.6 billion people, mainly women and children, continue to cook using these techniques, as they cannot afford to utilize more clean fuels.

This type of cooking leads to particulate matter, methane, carbon monoxide, polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), and volatile organic compounds (VOC) that cause a variety of respiratory illnesses, cancer, and eye problems. In most cases, these stoves are not vented properly and/or used inside, which makes the problem even worse. Particulate Matter, commonly known as soot, is highly dangerous, and it is believed that it is responsible for about half of all pneumonia fatalities in children under the age of five. Over 3.8M deaths occur annually due to respiratory illnesses, cancer, and complications due to eye problems.

Indoor air pollution is still a major problem in the industrialized world, even though cooking is rarely done on open biomass stoves. Natural gas (or LPG) consumption results in a considerable discharge of hazardous gases (Carbon Monoxide, Nitrogen Dioxide, Nitrogen Oxide, Formaldehyde, Methane) and Particulate Matter.

So why are more people not talking about this?

The general awareness of this topic among consumers is extremely low. Indoor air quality remains entirely unregulated today, and gas appliances retain their industry-manufactured reputation as "clean.”

All information from: WHO “Air pollution”