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发帖数: 3205 | 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/world/asia/air-pollution-link
Air Pollution Linked to 1.2 Million Premature Deaths in China
BEIJING — Outdoor air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature
deaths in China in 2010, nearly 40 percent of the global total, according to
a new summary of data from a scientific study on leading causes of death
worldwide.
Figured another way, the researchers said, China’s toll from pollution was
the loss of 25 million healthy years of life from the population.
The data on which the analysis is based was first presented in the ambitious
2010 Global Burden of Disease Study, which was published in December in The
Lancet, a British medical journal. The authors decided to break out numbers
for specific countries and present the findings at international
conferences. The China statistics were offered at a forum in Beijing on
Sunday.
“We have been rolling out the India- and China-specific numbers, as they
speak more directly to national leaders than regional numbers,” said Robert
O’Keefe, the vice president of Health Effects Institute, a research
organization that is helping to present the study. The organization is
partly financed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the
global motor vehicle industry.
What the researchers called “ambient particulate matter pollution” was the
fourth leading risk factor for deaths in China in 2010, behind dietary
risks, high blood pressure and smoking. Air pollution ranked seventh on the
worldwide list of risk factors, contributing to 3.2 million deaths in 2010.
By comparison with China, India, which also has densely populated cities
grappling with similar levels of pollution, had 620,000 premature deaths in
2010 because of outdoor air pollution, the study found. That was deemed to
be the sixth most common killer in South Asia.
The study was led by an institute at the University of Washington and
several partner universities and institutions, including the World Health
Organization.
Calculations of premature deaths because of outdoor air pollution are
politically threatening in the eyes of some Chinese officials. According to
news reports, Chinese officials cut out sections of a 2007 report called “
Cost of Pollution in China” that discussed premature deaths. The report’s
authors had concluded that 350,000 to 400,000 people die prematurely in
China each year because of outdoor air pollution. The study was done by the
World Bank in cooperation with the Chinese State Environmental Protection
Administration, the precursor to the Ministry of Environmental Protection.
There have been other estimates of premature deaths because of air pollution
. In 2011, the World Health Organization estimated that there were 1.3
million premature deaths in cities worldwide because of outdoor air
pollution.
Last month, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, based
in Paris, warned that “urban air pollution is set to become the top
environmental cause of mortality worldwide by 2050, ahead of dirty water and
lack of sanitation.” It estimated that up to 3.6 million people could end
up dying prematurely from air pollution each year, mostly in China and India.
There has been growing outrage in Chinese cities over what many say are
untenable levels of air pollution. Cities across northern China hit record
levels in January. Because of that, official Chinese newspapers ran front-
page articles on the surge, despite earlier limits on such discussion by
propaganda officials. In February, the State Council, China’s cabinet,
announced a timeline for the introduction of new fuel standards, but state-
owned oil and power companies are known to block or ignore environmental
policies to save on costs.
A study released on Thursday said the growth rate of disclosure of pollution
information in 113 Chinese cities had slowed. The groups doing the study,
the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, based in Beijing, and the
Natural Resources Defense Council, based in Washington, said that “faced
with the current situation of severe air, water and soil pollution, we must
make changes to pollution source information disclosure so that information
is no longer patchy, out of date and difficult to obtain.”
Chinese officials have made some progress in disclosing crucial air
pollution statistics. Official news reports have said 74 cities are now
required to release data on levels of particulate matter 2.5 micrometers in
diameter or smaller, which penetrate the body’s tissues most deeply. For
years, Chinese officials had been collecting the data but refusing to
release it, until they came under pressure from Chinese who saw that the
United States Embassy in Beijing was measuring the levels hourly and posting
the data in a Twitter feed, @BeijingAir.
Last week, an official Chinese news report said the cost of environmental
degradation in China was about $230 billion in 2010, or 3.5 percent of the
nation’s gross domestic product. The estimate, said to be partial, came
from a research institute under the Ministry of Environmental Protection,
and was three times the amount in 2004, in local currency terms. It was
unclear to what extent those numbers took into account the costs of health
care and premature deaths because of pollution. |
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