UNICEF issues India toxic air warning
Print Edition
AS Indians awoke yesterday to smoke-filled skies from a weekend of festival fireworks, New Delhi’s worst season for air pollution began — with dire consequences.
A new report from UNICEF says about a third of the 2 billion children in the world who are breathing toxic air live in northern India and neighboring countries, risking serious health effects including damage to their lungs, brains and other organs. Of that global total, 300 million kids are exposed to pollution levels more than six times higher than standards set by the World Health Organization, including 220 million in South Asia.
For the Indian capital, the alarming numbers are hardly a surprise. New Delhi’s air pollution, among the world’s worst, spikes every winter because of the season’s weak winds and countless trash fires set alight to help people stay warm.
Even days before the city erupted in annual fireworks celebrations for the Hindu holiday of Diwali, recorded levels of tiny, lung-clogging particulate matter known as PM2.5 were considered dangerous on Friday at well above 300 micrograms per cubic meter. By yesterday morning, the city was recording PM2.5 levels above 900 mcg per cubic meter — more than 90 times higher than the WHO recommendation of no more than 10 mcg per cubic meter.
Children face much higher health risks from air pollution than adults. Children breathe twice as quickly, taking in more air in relation to their body weight, while their brains and immune systems are still developing and vulnerable.
“The impact is commensurately shocking,” with 600,000 children younger than 5 across the world dying every year from air pollution-related diseases, UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake said in the report yesterday. Counting 2 billion children breathing unhealthy air — out of a total 2.26 billion world population of children — means the vast majority are being exposed to levels of pollution considered unsafe.
Out of that 2 billion breathing toxic air, the report puts 620 million of them in South Asia — mostly northern India.
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