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| Block 8: Environmental Issues and Public Health - Air Pollution Chapter 1: Introduction (Continued) |
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The following two excerpts from WHOa indicate the overall burden of air pollution related disease:
"Achievements in air quality management underlie increased economic and social welfare in many developing countries. Sound air quality management is also a proven way of enhancing public health, since air pollution is associated with increases in outpatient visits due to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, in hospital admissions and in daily mortality. Recent estimates of the increase in daily mortality show that on a global scale 4-8% of premature deaths are due to exposure to particulate matter in the ambient and indoor environment. Moreover, around 20- 30% of all respiratory diseases appear to be caused by ambient and indoor air pollution, with emphasis on the latter. It is suggested that without clean air, a sound economic development becomes virtually impossible and social conflicts inevitable. Although enormous progress has been made in developing clean air implementation plans for urban areas, especially in developed countries, a substantial number of people living in urban areas - around 1.5 billion, or 25 per cent of the global population - are still exposed to enhanced concentrations of gaseous and particle compounds in the air they breathe. And the use of open fires for indoor cooking and heating currently exposes about 2 billion people to quite substantial concentrations of suspended particulate matter, 10-20 times higher than ambient concentrations according to the limited measurements available. Other sources of air pollution include industrial and vehicular emissions, as well as vegetation fires. Furthermore, the rate of population growth continues to increase and is likely to peak around the year 2000, leading to a doubling of the global population by the middle of the 21 st century. Most population growth will occur in low-income countries and will stress already inadequate infrastructures and technical and financial capacities. In parallel, the process of urbanisation will continue, such that the proportion of the global population living in cities will increase from around 45% to around 62% by the year 2025, creating dense centres of anthropogenic emissions."
"There are three broad sources of air pollution from human activities: Stationary sources, Mobile sources, and Indoor sources. In developing countries, indoor air pollution from using open fires for cooking and heating may be a serious problem. It has been estimated that in developing countries, about 1.9 million people die annually due to exposure to high concentrations of suspended particulate matter in the indoor air environment of rural areas, while the excess mortality due to suspended particulate matter and sulphur dioxide in the ambient air amounts to about 500 000 people annually. Although the indoor air database is weak due to the scarcity of monitoring results, these estimates indicate that a serious indoor air problem may exist in developing countries."
The South Africa database of air pollution exposures is weak and incomplete; in general, population exposure is poorly characterised with respect to both indoor and ambient concentrations, the number of people exposed and the vulnerability of the exposed population to air pollutants. However there are several areas of known high ambient air pollution concentration, particularly the heavily industrialised areas of the Vaal triangle and the South Durban Industrial Basin, and Cape Town is known to suffer from the "Brown Haze" during the winter months. In all three areas, air pollution monitoring network data may provide a limited estimate of population exposures. The use of coal for cooking and heating is widespread in the townships of the inland cities, and biomass fuels continue to be used in rural areas. Paraffin is widely used for cooking and space heating. These factors suggest that the South Africa burden of air pollution related disease and mortality is likely to be significant, although as yet unquantified.
