Air pollution is reaching levels never seen before. And it is hitting the most vulnerable section of the population: around 630 million children under the age of 5 are exposed to PM2.5 levels above the values considered safe by the WHO.
A gulp of poison with every breath. This is the damning bulletin released by the World Health Organisation (WHO) one day before the start of the first global conference on air pollution. The report "Air pollution and child health: prescribing clean air" reveals that 93 per cent of children under the age of 18 are exposed to levels of fine particulate matter exceeding the levels set out in the WHO air quality guidelines. Of these, at least 630 million children under the age of 5 are exposed to PM2.5 levels above air quality standards. The World Health Organisation itself estimates that 600,000 children died in 2016 as a result of acute respiratory infections caused by toxic air.
"Air pollution is poisoning millions of children and ruining their lives and this is unforgivable," said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the WHO, in a statement released alongside the report. "Every child should be able to breathe clean air so that they can grow up and fulfil their potential." Yet this is not the case. Because a toxic and often intangible poison lurks in the alveoli, the tissues, the blood, causing not only frequently serious infections, but genuine cognitive disorders.
The worst-affected areas are the planet's poorest and developing regions: South-East Asia, where 99 per cent of all children under the age of 5 are exposed to health-threatening levels, and the Western Pacific, where 98 per cent of children are affected. The problem is linked in particular to the widespread use of wood and fossil fuels for cooking, heating and lighting, and to the fact that newborns and very young children spend most of their time close to the ground, where concentrations of pollutants are highest. It is estimated that 40 per cent of the world's population — including 1 billion young people under the age of 15 — still use highly polluting technologies and fuels.
While in developing countries the main causes are limited access to energy and the use of outdated technologies, in western countries high levels of consumption are among the chief culprits: here more than half of the youngest children are exposed to worrying levels of fine and ultrafine particulate matter, the majority of which is attributable to road traffic, fossil fuel energy production and domestic heating.
Updated health impact estimates calculated by the European Environment Agency (EEA) point to 422,000 premature deaths in 2015 due to PM2.5, of which 391,000 occurred in the EU-28. As noted by the agency in the report "Air quality in Europe", particulate matter concentrations continued to exceed limit values across large areas of Europe throughout 2016: almost one fifth of monitoring stations in 19 of the 28 member states reported values above the safety threshold. With the exception of Iceland, Switzerland, Ireland and Estonia. Evidently, the air is cleaner there.