By Michelle Chen, Progressive.org

January 1, 2020

Pollution is the world’s leading cause of death, ahead of tobacco use, drug and alcohol use, and even war.

The way we live is killing us.

Pollution—whether it comes from a car’s tailpipe, a coal-fired power plant, or a toxic waste dump—claimed more than eight million lives around the world in 2017, fully 15 percent of all deaths. That’s according to a new report published by the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution, a coalition of environmental and health institutions and agencies.

In fact, pollution is the world’s leading cause of death, ahead of tobacco use, drug and alcohol use, and even war. And the United States is one of the leading sources of pollution-induced death. The Global Alliance on Health and Pollution study, drawing on data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, frames pollution as one of the world’s largest, yet most neglected public health threats.

On top of mass mortality, pollution in 2017 resulted in the equivalent of 275 million years of Disability-Adjusted Life Years, a measure of the years that individuals lose to illness, disability, or premature death. Roughly five million deaths are attributed to polluted air, mostly from outdoor sources in urban and industrialized areas.

Climate change is exacerbating the problem of dirty air.

Altogether, the estimated health burden of pollution from air, water, lead contamination, and workplaces reflects a cross section of human suffering worldwide, the vast majority concentrated in low and middle-income countries. But one of the top countries for pollution-related death is among the richest: the United States ranks number seven, with some 197,000 deaths due to pollution […]

Continued at https://popularresistance.org/air-water-pollution-cause-more-deaths-than-war-tobacco-drugs-or-alcohol/