Microkillers
Microparticles will shorten the life of the Russian population by 110 million years
Researchers from the United States, using data from national medical statistics, calculated how, on average, microparticles with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less shorten the life expectancy of the population of 185 countries around the world. It turned out that these figures are quite high and for the world on average exceed one year. In other words, for the average Earthling, the presence of such particles in the air reduces his average life expectancy by more than 12 months. Values close to this are typical for residents of Russia. The corresponding article is published in Environmental Science&Technology Letters (Apte et al., Ambient PM2.5 Reduces Global and Regional Life Expectancy).
Microparticles smaller than certain sizes are atypical for the atmosphere of our planet: normally there are quite a few of them there and they are quickly washed out by rains. However, where a person lives, he, as a rule, burns various types of fuels, which emits a lot of microparticles into the air. In winter, when it rains quite rarely, the washing out of such particles can take a long time (the same can be said about southern countries with a dry climate). Meanwhile, microparticles from 2.5 micrometers in diameter or less are very poorly filtered by the human respiratory tract. Therefore, they often enter the lungs, and from there – into the blood vessels. They cause cardiovascular diseases, lung diseases, and cancer.
The authors of the new work have done a lot of work to calculate how specifically these particles shorten the life of the average inhabitant of a particular country. For a resident of our planet, on average, such particles shortened life by 1.03 years. This is quite a large figure – all types of air pollution shorten the lives of people on the planet by an average of 1.85 years, that is, microparticles are responsible for the bulk of this period.
For comparison, it can be pointed out that the pollution of drinking water reduces the life expectancy of people by only 0.57 years. Sex without a condom is only 0.37 years old, and then mainly due to Africa, due to the particularly high probability of HIV and hepatitis transmission.
For Russia, microparticles shorten the life of an average resident by 0.77 years. In the USA, for example, this figure is only 0.38 years old – mainly due to the dispersion of the local population over a large area (in low-rise residential buildings), which prevents microparticles typical of the air of a large city from "reaching" a significant part of the population. On the other hand, in China, with its denser urban development and the leading role of coal-fired thermal power plants in the energy sector, this indicator is 1.25 years. This is noticeably more than in Russia, where gas-fired thermal power plants dominate.
At the same time, not only coal-fired energy and urbanization are factors that increase the risk of death from the effects of inhaling microparticles. Countries such as Burkina Faso (-1.33 years to life expectancy due to microparticles) and Afghanistan (-1.67 years) do not have a developed industry or coal-fired power, like China. However, for their population, the probability of premature death due to microparticles is even higher than the Chinese one. In such places, the key sources of microparticles are firewood and other fuels used for cooking and heating, due to the lack of sufficiently accessible electricity and gas supply systems in these countries.
A new study shows that the damage from microparticles has a rather large scale. The reduction in average life expectancy by 1.03 years means that humanity as a whole must lose at least 7.5 billion man-years from microparticles during the lifetime of the current generation. For Russia, this figure is more than 110 million man-years.
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