The 2018 WHO report titled Air Pollution and Child Health: Prescribing clean air is a compendium of the latest scientific knowledge that links the exposure to polluted air with adverse health impacts upon children. This report is timely given the fact that significant media coverage and public conversation around major environmental threats currently centres around air pollution. It is reported that the exposure to anthropogenic and natural pollutants in the household and ambient environment results in around seven million premature deaths annually. According to WHO, while this public health crisis has been receiving considerable attention, one aspect has been critically overlooked i.e. how air pollution affects children in uniquely damaging ways, due to a plethora of physiological, environmental and behavioural factors, thereby impacting their health and survival.
Ambient air pollution is caused by fossil fuel combustion, waste incineration, agricultural and industrial processes as well as natural factors like volcanic eruptions, dust forms, wildfires etc. They vary across rural and urban areas but no region is safer than the other. In 2016, ambient air pollution resulted in 4.2 million premature deaths, out of which 3,00,000 were children under five years of age. Household air pollution is caused by the incomplete combustion of fuels as well as cooking, heating and lighting technologies. According to WHO estimates, 41% of the population in low and middle-income countries used polluting sources of cooking in 2016.
Combined with household air pollution, respiratory tract infections caused 5,43,000 children under the age of 5 and 52,000 children aged 5-15 to die in 2016. Exposure to pollutants in-utero or during early life result in adverse birth outcomes like preterm birth, low birth weight, stillbirth and infant mortality. In case they survive, they suffer from hampered neuro and cognitive development, childhood cancers (retinoblastomas and leukaemia) or behavioural disorders. Other consequences include hampered motor development, metabolic outcomes (utero and postnatal weight gain or attained body-mass index for age, insulin resistance), impaired lung development and function/chronic lung disease as adults, ALRI, asthma otitis media.
The children are particularly vulnerable during their fetal development (depending on mother’s exposure to household air pollution) and early childhood because their brain, lungs and other organs are still developing and become inflamed or damaged easily. Their breathing is much faster than that of adults as a result of which they take in more air and hence, more pollutants. They are usually closer to the ground where the pollutants are often at peak concentrations. Those that spend a lot of time outside playing and engaging in other physical activity are susceptible to ambient air pollution, while newborns and infants spend most of their time indoors and are thereby closer to polluting fuels and devices. Overall, their growth as productive and healthy individuals is hampered.
More than half of all deaths amongst children under five years of age is caused by ALRI, making it one of the leading killers of children across the world. The two maps given above depict the burden of only ALRI. However, the total burden of morbidity and mortality amongst children due to exposure to household and ambient air pollution is much higher.
At a glance:
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Worldwide, 93% children (1.8 billion) under the age of 15 years breathe polluted air daily and their health and development is under severe risk
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In low- and middle-income countries, 98% of the children under five years of age are exposed to PM2.5 levels above the WHO air quality guidelines
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In high-income countries, 52% of the children under five years of age are exposed to pollution levels above WHO quality guidelines
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More than 40% of the global population, including one billion children under the age of 15, have been exposed to high levels of household pollution
Air pollution is a global crisis but, the burden of particulate matter that causes it is the greatest in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), particularly in Africa, South-East Asia, Eastern Mediterranean and Western Pacific regions. The African Region especially records the highest levels of exposure to household air pollution, due to the widespread use of polluting fuels and technologies for basic daily needs, such as cooking, heating and lighting.
India Outbound
December 10, 2018
source https://indiaoutbound.org/a-childs-right-to-breathe-safe-air-part-1/
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