A new study was able to quantify China's air pollution problem, stating the airborne smog accounts for one of every six premature deaths in the country.
According to the Associated Press, authors of a study published in the journal PLOS One blamed air pollution for an average of 1.6 million deaths per year. Led by physicists at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), the new study linked deaths by heart and lung failure, as well as stroke to air pollution.
"Air pollution is the greatest environmental disaster in the world today," study co-author Richard Muller, scientific director of Berkeley Earth, said in a press release. "When I was last in Beijing, pollution was at the hazardous level; every hour of exposure reduced my life expectancy by 20 minutes. It's as if every man, women, and child smoked 1.5 cigarettes each hour."
The researchers also noted that the air nearly 40 percent of Chinese citizens are regularly subjected to would be deemed unacceptable in the U.S. and Europe, Discovery.com' DSCOVRD blog reported.
"It's troubling that air pollution is killing so many and yet isn't on the radar for major environmental organizations in the US or Europe," Elizabeth Muller, executive director of Berkeley Earth, said in the release. "Many of the same solutions that mitigate air pollution will simultaneously reduce China's contribution to global warming. We can save lives today and tomorrow."
Jason West, a researcher at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill not associated study, told the AP the UCB physicists' work "will be widely influential." Also unaffiliated with the research, Allen Robinson, at Carnegie Mellon University, told the AP China will have to turn to cleaner energy like some major cities with similar problems now behind them.
