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News > Science and Tech

Acceptable WHO Air Pollution Safety Standards Still Unsafe: Study

  • A woman wearing a protective mask makes her way in a business district on a heavily polluted day in Beijing, China January 3, 2016.

    A woman wearing a protective mask makes her way in a business district on a heavily polluted day in Beijing, China January 3, 2016. | Photo: Reuters

Published 29 January 2020
Opinion

More than 90 percent of cases linking cardiac arrest to PM2.5 particles occurred in environments with air pollution levels set lower than the WHO benchmark, according to the study.

A leading medical journal said Tuesday that brief exposure to air pollution can cause heart attacks, even under levels most monitoring agencies consider safe.

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Peer-reviewed journal The Lancet said a comprehensive study conducted in Japan with the largest recorded monitoring, population density and relative air quality samples, had shown even short-term exposure to certain levels of fine particulate matter could be deadly.

“Short-term exposure to PM2.5 was associated with an increased risk of [cardiac arrest] even at relatively low concentrations,” the study’s findings read.

PM2.5 particles are ones of the finest and most harmful kind of matter found in polluted air studied so far. Their concentration increases with higher pollution levels and requires that special masks be worn that prevent absorption into the lungs.

The study added that levels of air pollution considered safe by bodies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) had to be revised, as the current ones were insufficient to reduce the risk of contracting respiratory diseases.

“Regulatory standards and targets need to incorporate the potential health gains from continual air quality improvement even in locations already meeting WHO standards,” the report read.

Since 2005, the organization has set its standard of acceptable PM2.5 levels at 25 micrograms per cubic meter on a daily mean. This is also the level in Australia.

In other developed economies such as the United States and Japan, they’re set at 35 micrograms per cubic meter, while in developing countries such as Thailand, it is set at 50 micrograms per cubic meter – double the recommended threshold.

Though it has steadily declined in the last nine years, more than 90 percent of the global population is exposed to levels of PM2.5 particles higher than what the WHO deems safe, according to the World Bank’s latest data.

On Tuesday afternoon, levels in Beijing, China – the world’s most polluted city at that moment according to monitoring agency Air Visual – were at almost 10 times the WHO recommendation at 238 micrograms per cubic meter.

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