The Weather Channel
Sean Breslin
Aug 14 2015
China’s choking pollution contributes to 1.6 million deaths per year, according to a new scientific paper released by Berkeley Earth.
That’s an average of more than 4,400 people per day dying from respiratory diseases worsened by smog, the study said. Air pollution contributes to roughly 17 percent of all deaths in the country, the study also found.
“Air pollution is a problem for much of the developing world and is believed to kill more people worldwide than AIDS, malaria, breast cancer, or tuberculosis,” the report said.
The study also found the source of much of China’s pollution: a faraway industrial zone where Chinese power plants burn coal and push loads of pollution into the air ever day.
The New York Times notes that the distant source of the pollution could make it harder for Beijing to clean up its air before the Winter Olympics in 2022, when the city hosts the event.
Authors of the study analyzed more than 1,500 ground stations in mainland China every hour for more than four months to compile their data, and the findings were startling. They learned that nearly 40 percent of the population is breathing air that’s considered unhealthy according to standards established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Berkeley Earth said the paper will be published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal PLOS One.
A bus is seen at a toll booth on a highway as vehicles are forced to wait due to heavy smog in Jilin, northeast China’s Jilin province on October 22, 2013. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)
