GENEVA, Switzerland – For seven million people around the world each year, breathing is deadly.
Air pollution kills seven million people annually—including 600,000 children—the World Health Organization (WHO) said Monday.
Almost all of them in poor countries in Asia and Africa, with nine out of ten people on the planet breathing in toxic air.
According to WHO, 93-percent of the world’s children under the age of 15, which represents 1.8 billion children, are affected by poisonous air damaging their intelligence and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths due to acute lower respiratory infections.
WHO Director for Public Health and Environment Dr. Maria Neira said, “Almost 93 percent of the children worldwide are breathing toxic air. And this has terrible health consequences.
“If a pregnant woman is exposed to air pollution, then the risk of having a pre-term birth is very high. In addition to that, the baby will be a very small weight.”
“We need solutions and those solutions are there, we need to call. This is an urgent call to everyone who can provide solutions because we need to scale up dramatically the response to fight air pollution.”
WHO will hold its Global Air Pollution Conference Tuesday.
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