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Pollution causes 9 million deaths each year worldwide

Pollution causes 9 million deaths each year worldwide

Air pollution is the direct cause of 9 million deaths each year throughout the world, as highlighted today by the participants in the second and final day of the I International Meeting on Environmental Health and Diseases, which has been held since Thursday in Barcelona.

The experts who have participated in the meeting, which has been held at the HM Nou Delfos Hospital in the Spanish city, have warned that exposure to pollution during the first year of life and childhood affects different traits of intelligence, performance and cognition, while in adults it favors the development of diseases such as COPD, asthma, allergies, tumors or alterations in the endocrine system.

The second day of the I International Meeting on Environmental Health and Diseases has served to analyze which are the main causes of death of the world population and what are the characteristics of the environment in which they occur.

The results are significant, since air pollution is causing 9 million deaths a year in the world, while climate change directly affects the death of 500,000 people a year and, indirectly, that of tens of millions.”explained Fernando Valladares, director of the Ecology and Global Change group at the National Museum of Natural Sciences, who presented the paper entitled “What do we die of?”.

More than a hundred professionals from different sectors have met for the first time with the aim of discussing how environmental factors may be influencing the development of new pathologies or the increase in the incidence of already known disorders.

In this sense, specialists have estimated that environmental factors may be the cause of approximately 35% of all deaths that occur each year in the world.

According to Valladares, air pollution is associated with the development of respiratory diseases such as COPD or asthma, cardiovascular diseases such as stroke, brain, lung or bladder cancer, and endocrine system problems (metabolic disruptions).

Valladares has stressed that “Historically, life expectancy has been lengthening thanks to scientific and medical advances, but for a few years it has been observed that it has stagnated and different studies suggest that environmental degradation is faster than medical progress ”.

This way, –has added– for the first time in 150 years, the fact that the generation of children lives fewer years than that of their parents could occur.

Society is increasingly aware of the relationship between the environment and health,” said Juan Antonio Ortega, coordinator of the Pediatric Environmental Health Unit (PEHSU) of the Virgen de la Arrixaca University Clinical Hospital in Murcia (southeast), who He has given the conference “PEHSU Orbit: The power of good health”.

The specialist, with more than 20 years of experience in pediatrics and environmental health, added that “It is no longer strange for parents to ask what habits they should follow to protect their children. Now, what is needed is to translate what is already known into clinical practice and it will be necessary to create specific units, which are currently very rare in Spanish healthcare. Our challenge is not to humanize medicine, but to renaturalize it”.

After holding this I International Meeting on Health and Environmental Diseases, HM Hospitales has joined the Kosma Observatory project, a multidisciplinary entity created in 2022 whose objective is to promote health care, research, training, dissemination and innovative activity and environmental diseases.

Source: EFE

Source: Gestion

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