(FOTO DI HOW HWEE YOUNG/EPA)
A study by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley shows that air pollution in China is linked to the deaths of over four thousand people every day.
By Esha Dey
Originally Published: August 14, 2015
Air pollution is killing about 1.6 million people every year in China, or nearly 4,400 people every day, accounting for seventeen percent of all the country’s deaths, a new study has found.
Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley found the sources of pollution to be widespread, but particularly intense in a corridor extending from Shanghai to Beijing. The paper, which has been accepted for publication in the journal PLOS ONE, analyzed hourly pollution measurements for a period of four months from April 5, 2014 to August 5, 2014. Data was collected from 1,500 sites.
Thirty-eight percent of the Chinese population was exposed to unhealthy levels of pollution, according to the standards defined by the US Environmental Protection Agency, the researchers concluded.
“Air pollution is the greatest environmental disaster in the world today,” Richard Muller, study author and the scientific director of Berkeley Earth, told VICE News. “We listen to the news reports of the explosion in Tianjin and we hear of maybe hundreds dying, but that same day more than 4,000 people are going to die of air pollution.”
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