Hospitals in Dhaka nowadays have to cope with pressure of an increasing number of patients with respiratory diseases mainly caused by the unhealthy air of the city, say chest disease specialists and air experts.
Air index shows Dhaka air remains a little better in May-September, but it is of a moderate category still. The rest of the time, it remains very unhealthy to dangerous.
During this period, the hospitals receive an increased number of patients with a high death rate.
Major hospitals in Dhaka — National Institute of Diseases of the Chest and Hospital, 250-bed TB Hospital, Dhaka Medical College and Hospital, Mitford Hospital – mostly handle an overwhelming pressure of such patients, say physicians.
Ahsan Habib, a resident of Badda in Dhaka, caught an uninterrupted high fever last month, with a body temperature of 103-104 Fahrenheit (F) and chest pain, which lasted for a week. He was taken to private hospital in Uttar Badda.
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The air pollution level in Dhaka is more than eight times the WHO limit and reduces life expectancy by nearly 7 years in Bangladesh, says another study of the University of Chicago.
Continue Reading at the Financial Express…
In 2014, the World Health Organization reported that New Delhi was one of the most polluted cities in the world, with dangerous levels of fine particulate matter pollution, known as PM2.5. Ever since, New Delhi has been synonymous with hazardous air quality.
Over the last few years the air quality levels in one of the world’s fastest growing metropolises have ebbed and flowed, but for the most part New Delhi’s pollution levels remain higher than most cities across the world.
Now, the Swedish air quality monitoring company IQAir has released its annual World Air Quality report for the year 2021, again ranking New Delhi among the most polluted cities in the world and the most polluted capital city for a fourth consecutive year. IQAir also found that South Asia was the world’s most polluted region, where PM2.5 emissions from vehicle exhaust, commerce, the burning of stalks and other crop residue after harvest season and in-home cooking with solid fuels all combine to dangerously degrade air quality.
“You can barely see the leaves anymore, there’s a layer of dust that covers them all the time,” said Renu Singh, 39, a Ph.D student at Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi, describing the visible effects of air pollution in the city.
Singh, who has lived in Delhi for most of her life, has seen the city grow into a metropolitan area of more than 30 million people. Data suggests Delhi’s population will likely surpass Tokyo’s by the year 2030 and reach 39 million. And as the city continues to grow, so does its air pollution problem.
According to the 2019 Air Quality Life Index published by the University of Chicago, residents in Delhi would lose more than nine years of life expectancy if pollution levels from 2019 persist. The World Health Organization associates many short- and long-term health risk factors with exposure to PM2.5, tiny droplets of pollution smaller than 2.5 microns—about one-thirtieth the diameter of a human hair—that irritate the eyes, nose and lungs, aggravate asthma and other respiratory diseases and increase the risk of death from lung cancer and heart disease.
These particles come from vehicle exhaust, the burning of fuels such as wood, heating oil or coal, and natural sources such as grass and wildfires.
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The University of Chicago Air Quality Life Index estimates hazardous air quality levels have reduced life expectancy throughout the Indo-Gangetic plain by seven years. One of the most densely populated regions in the world, the plain is home to more than 500 million people and the hub for small, medium and large scale economic activity in South Asia.
Continue Reading at Inside Climate News...
The atmosphere has changed in Beijing since the Chinese capital’s last Olympics in 2008. While the Summer Games 14 years ago were meant to be a forward-looking celebration of China taking its place on the world stage, the 2022 Winter Olympics have a markedly dourer tone, hamstrung by Covid-19 and political controversy.
But one aspect of Beijing’s atmosphere has clearly improved: the air itself. While the 2008 Games were marked by some of the worst air quality in Olympic history, China’s “war against pollution” has advanced so much since that Olympians this month could glimpse the previously smog-enshrouded mountains surrounding the city. Air pollution in the capital has decreased by 50 percent since the 2008 Olympics, which if maintained will lead to four years of additional life for the average Beijing resident.
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According to the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), global air pollution has decreased since 2011, but that drop is mostly concentrated in China. Most countries across South Asia, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa have experienced steady or increased air pollution in recent decades. The situation is especially bad throughout much of India: As of 2020, nine of the world’s 10 most polluted cities were in India, and people throughout the Indo-Gangetic plain could expect to live as much as nine years longer if pollution was reduced to the WHO guideline numbers.
To some degree, the increase in air pollution is a byproduct of economic development: more cars, more energy, more growth. But severe air pollution isn’t an immutable law of nature. From 2013 to 2019, China reduced its particulate pollution by 29 percent by using a suite of policies, including implementing new and better-enforced emissions standards for coal plants, limiting the building of new coal plants, restricting vehicles on roads in large cities, and increasing renewable energy. “If these reductions are sustained,” states an EPIC report from 2021, “China’s people can expect to live 1.5 years longer.”
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“Most of what we know about the impacts of air pollution on health are from short-term exposure studies, so these are studies that take advantage of daily or weekly or sometimes quarterly differences in air pollution concentrations,” says Michael Greenstone, director of EPIC, whose AQLI (Air Quality Life Index) tracks reduced life expectancy from air pollution. Yet, he adds, “the reason we regulate it is to change people’s long-run exposure to air pollution.”
The AQLI estimates are based on a 2013 paper that used a home heating program in China to approximate years of life lost by air pollution. From the 1950s to the 1980s, the Chinese government provided free coal for winter heating for households north of the Huai River, but not south of it. That policy created a natural experiment: Villages north and south of the river were mostly the same, save for increased indoor air pollution in the north because residents could afford to burn more coal there.
Life expectancies in those households north of the Huai River fell by an estimated 5.5 years. The researchers used this data to isolate the effect of air pollution from other potential causes of reduced life expectancy, and created the AQLI index to calculate the impact that different levels of particulate concentration can have on lifespan. Policymakers and the general public can use the AQLI to track how air quality has been affecting life expectancy in different countries and regions over the last 20 years. They’ve discovered that while air pollution shortens lives around the world, its main effects are concentrated in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa.
While air pollution in Delhi has been bad for decades, the last 20 years have seen air pollution worsen in other areas of India and South and Southeast Asia, as economic growth has translated into increased vehicle and fossil fuel use. In the Central Indian states of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, according to EPIC’s 2021 annual report, “the average person … is now losing an additional 2.5 to 2.9 years of life expectancy” relative to the early 2000s due to air pollution. “Eighty-three percent of the country, by one estimate,” says Santosh Harish, South Asian Air Quality program officer at Open Philanthropy, “breathes air that is worse than the national standards,” which are themselves more lenient than the WHO recommendations.
In neighboring Bangladesh, the average person is losing 5.4 years of life expectancy due to air pollution, much more than 20 years ago. Urbanized regions of Indonesia, such as Jakarta, face similar burdens on life expectancy due to vehicle-related pollution and coal-fired power plants. Forest and peatland fires for agricultural clearance related to palm oil production in Kalimantan and Sumatra affect air quality across Indonesia and throughout Southeast Asia.
Air pollution is a severe health threat in Nigeria, Ghana, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In Nigeria, home to over 200 million people, air pollution has reduced life expectancy by 1.5 additional years compared to the early 2000s, caused by vehicles, industrial emissions, waste burning, port pollution, and the operation of diesel generators that are used because of the country’s unreliable electricity supply. As energy consumption in sub-Saharan Africa has grown, air quality has decreased throughout the region, according to the AQLI.
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A complementary approach might be market-based policies. “A great way to soften those trade-offs,” Greenstone told me, “is to use market-based regulations, which really minimize the regulatory costs and minimize the impacts on economic growth, and while doing that allow for robust improvements in environmental quality and ultimately people’s health.” The state of Gujarat in India, for example, started an emissions trading program for air pollution in 2019 in which the government sets an emissions cap and companies could buy and sell permits to discharge pollutants, creating an incentive for them to reduce pollutants. This has cut air pollution by roughly 15-20 percent, according to Greenstone; with this success, the government is expanding the plan throughout Gujarat, and a similar program is being implemented by the Indian state of Punjab.
End-of-pipe control measures — which mandate pollution reductions at the source — face some of the same challenges around incentives. These upgrades, which cut conventional pollutants like SO2, are effective at cleaning up the air — though they don’t reduce carbon pollution — without requiring an immediate transition away from coal. That’s important for countries like India where the energy supply is still dominated by coal, and will likely be so for years.
Such policies have been highly effective at cleaning up the air in China and Europe, as well as the US, but Peng notes that regulators pushing for cleaner air need to grapple with “the organized interests from the power generation companies that don’t want to do additional things to increase their costs.” That means governments have to spend time and money on the process of negotiation, along with monitoring and enforcement.
Cultivating public demand for clean air by warning people about its health risks can also drive action by governments and individuals across countries. Greenstone noted how large policy changes in other countries, like China’s “war on pollution,” were influenced by public demand. In a best-case scenario, this can create a virtuous cycle of policymakers, researchers, and other actors — such as what Kejriwal was trying to achieve with his daily tweets on Delhi’s air pollution levels this winter.
Continue Reading at Vox…
The very act of breathing is killing us
Precisely one week ago, China’s capital city went into high alert about its dangerously deteriorating air quality. The municipal government in Beijing immediately clamped down on unnecessary traffic, shut down some major highways, closed all children’s playgrounds, and warned citizens to stay indoors until the crisis could be brought under control.
Beijing’s administrative authorities responded with such alacrity because the AQI (air quality index) had soared to 220, which is considered to be just one step below full-scale emergency in that country.
Here’s the kicker. On that very same day, it was business as usual in New Delhi, even though its own AQI was hovering at an abysmal 313. And many other cities across the subcontinent were even worse, with Meerut peaking at an almost unbelievable 440.
All this was just one more lowlight, in an unremitting pageant of bad news for all of us in South Asia. There is no getting around the facts. When it comes to this most vital category of health — the literal air that we breathe — our part of the world performs worst, right across the board.
Thus, at the very moment of my writing — noon on November 11 — the worst AQI of any city on the planet is in Lahore (468), followed by New Delhi (265). Also, in the bottom ten are Karachi (175), Mumbai (162) and Dhaka (157).
According to IQAir, the Swiss technology experts who maintain the excellent AirVisual real-time air quality information platform (www.iqair.com), amongst the 30 cities with the worst air quality in the world in 2020, an appalling 20 were in India alone, along with Manikganj and Dhaka in Bangladesh, and Lahore, Bawahalpur, and Faisalabad in Pakistan.
Aggregated slightly differently by country, which takes into account many additional locations outside the major cities, the IQAir results are not particularly different. The three worst polluted in the world are ranked like this: Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India.
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Just a few weeks ago in September, the University of Chicago released its Air Quality of Life Index, which warned that all across Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan, the average citizen would live an astonishing 5.6 additional years, if air pollution was curbed to meet WHO guidelines.
If the levels of pollution persist at 2019 levels (actually they have become significantly worse) the residents of Delhi and Kolkata will lose 9 years of life expectancy. For Dhaka, that number is an equally unpalatable 7.7 years.
It doesn’t always have to be this way.
For an example of how to turn things around, we only have to look at Beijing. From being the international byword for toxic air at the turn of the new millennium, it has brought the situation well under control. In the 2020 data from IQAir, the giant Chinese capital isn’t even in the worst 100 cities in the world.
The same can happen everywhere, it takes only political will along with visionary leadership.
When the University of Chicago released its index earlier this year, Michael Greenstone, the director of its Energy Policy Institute, summarized the situation very nicely: “High levels of air pollution are a part of people’s lives in [South Asia], just as they were in the US, England, Japan, and other countries in the past. The last several decades have seen tremendous progress in many of these countries, but this progress did not happen by accident — it was the result of policy choices.”
Continue Reading at Dhaka Tribune…
The country saw a total of 173,500 deaths in 2019 due to air pollution, which is over 50,000 more than the year 2017, said a global report on air pollution related to health burden. In 2017, the death toll was 123,000 in the country.
The US-based Health Effects Institute and Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation jointly published the report on Wednesday titled “State of Global Air 2020” under the global burden of disease project.
Bangladesh is ninth among the top 10 countries with the highest level of outdoor Ambient Particulate Matter (PM 2.5) which is very small at 2.5 micrometres in diameter or less, produced by all types of combustion common in urban and rural places.
PM 2.5, which is capable of penetrating deep into the respiratory tract and causing severe health damage, accounted for 74,000 deaths in Bangladesh. Household air pollution from solid fuel accounted for 94,800 deaths while the rest of the deaths are due to ozone exposure.
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Air pollution, especially the presence of particulate matter in the air, is shortening the life expectancy of Bangladeshis by seven years on average, a study done by Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago said on July 28.
Continue Reading at Dhaka Tribune…
Air pollution, especially the presence of particulate matter in the air, is shortening the life expectancy of Bangladeshis by seven years on average, a study says.
Anant Sudarshan, South Asia director of Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, presented the findings of the study at a webinar on Tuesday.
According to the study, the most polluted areas of the country are Dhaka and Khulna divisions, where average residents are exposed to the pollution that is eight times more than the World Health Organization’s (WHO) guidelines.
With the recent developments, Bangladesh currently is the most polluted out of 234 countries in the world. Every area in Bangladesh has exceeded the pollution level, according to both the WHO guidelines and the country’s own national standards.
In two decades (1998-2018), the increase in air pollution had cut 3.4 years off the lives of the average Bangladesh residents. In 1998, life expectancy was cut short by 2.8 years due to air pollution, while it stood at 6.2 years in 2018.
Meanwhile, pollution in South Asia is also on the rise. People living in Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan could see their lives cut short by 5 years on average, after being exposed to pollution levels that are now 44% higher than they were two decades ago.
Continue reading at Dhaka Tribune…
Air pollution cuts life expectancy for every man, woman and child on Earth by nearly two years, according to data released Tuesday which experts said showed poor air quality is “the greatest risk to human health”.
The Air Quality Life Index (AQLI) said that as the world races to find a vaccine to bring the COVID-19 pandemic under control, air pollution would continue to cause billions of people to lead shorter and sicker lives across the globe.
The index converts particulate air pollution — mainly from the burning of fossil fuels — into its impact on human health.
It found that despite significant reductions in particulate matter in China — once one of the world’s most polluted countries — the overall level of air pollution had stayed stable over the past two decades.
In countries such as India and Bangladesh, air pollution was so severe that it now cuts average lifespans in some areas by nearly a decade.
Authors of the research said the quality of the air many humans breathe constituted a far higher health risk than COVID-19.
Continue reading at AFP…
