Air Pollution Is Shortening People's Lives by Nearly Three Years, According to a New Study

"Policy-makers and the medical community should be paying much more attention to this. Both air pollution and smoking are preventable, but over the past decades much less attention has been paid to air pollution than to smoking, especially among cardiologists."

The researchers employed a method of modeling the effects of various sources of air pollution on death rates and found that air pollution caused an extra 8.8 million premature deaths a year worldwide in 2015. This is the equivalent of an average shortening of the lifespan of nearly three years for all people on the planet.

“It is remarkable that both the number of deaths and the loss in life expectancy from air pollution rival the effect of tobacco smoking and are much higher than other causes of death. Air pollution exceeds malaria as a global cause of premature death by a factor of 19; it exceeds violence by a factor of 16, HIV/AIDS by a factor of 9, alcohol by a factor of 45, and drug abuse by a factor of 60," said Max Planck Institute for Chemistry's Jos Lelieveld who led the research along with Münzel.

Tobacco was responsible for 7.2 million deaths in 2015, HIV/AIDS for 1 million deaths, and all forms of violence (including deaths in wars) for 530,000 deaths. The study was published in Cardiovascular Research.