AIR POLLUTION

Subject: Environment

Context: The India State-Level Disease Burden Initiative published a scientific paper on Tuesday on the health and economic impact of air pollution in Lancet Planetary Health, which documents the trends in health loss due to air pollution and its economic impact in every state of India.

Concept:

• As many as 1.7 million deaths in India — 18 per cent of the total deaths in the country — were attributable to air pollution in 2019.
• The economic impact of this health loss due to lost productivity was huge, resulting in 1.4 per cent loss of the country’s GDP in 2019 .
• The findings in the paper highlight that the disease burden due to household air pollution is reducing in India but the same has increased due to ambient outdoor air pollution.
• Meanwhile, household air pollution is decreasing in India resulting in 64 per cent reduction in the death rate attributable to it from 1990 to 2019, whereas the death rate from outdoor ambient air pollution has increased during this period by 115 per cent.

Household Air Pollution

• With the continual improvement in our quality of life, indoor air quality has become an important area of concern in the 21st century.
• Indoor air quality is affected by many factors, including the type and running conditions of indoor pollution sources, ventilation conditions, as well as indoor activities.
• According to WHO, around three billion people, mostly women in the villages of India and in other parts of the world still cook and heat their homes using dirty solid fuels.
• These include waste wood, charcoal, coal, dung and abundantly available crop wastes. These are burnt on open fireplaces, cooking stoves etc. This generates a large amount of air pollutants such as sulphur dioxide (SO2), nitrous oxides (NOx), carbon monoxide (CO), and particulate matter (PM).
• A number of air pollutants have been recognised to exist indoors, including NOx, SO2, ozone (O3), CO, volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds (VOCs), PM, radon and microorganisms.
• Some of these pollutants (NOx, SO2, O3, and PM) are common to both indoor and outdoor environments and some of them may originate from outdoors.
• These air pollutants can be inorganic, organic, biological or even radioactive. The effect of these air pollutants on humans depends on their toxicity, concentration and exposure time and may vary from person to person.
• The most common effect is called sick building syndrome (SBS), in which people experience uncomfortable or acute health effects such as irritation of nose, eyes and throat, skin ailments, allergies and so on.