Air pollution is responsible for shortening people’s lives worldwide on a scale far greater than wars and other forms of violence, parasitic and vector-born diseases such as malaria, HIV/AIDS and smoking, according to an open-access study published in Cardiovascular Research . Professors Jos Lelieveld and Thomas Münzel, of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Department of Cardiology of the University Medical Center Mainz in Mainz, Germany, who led the research, say the findings suggest the world is facing an air pollution “pandemic”. Heat map of annual years of life lost from air pollution (units per 1000 km 2 ). The global total is 233 (221–250) million per year. Lelieveld et al. Using a new method of modelling the effects of various sources of air pollution on death rates, the researchers estimated that globally air pollution caused an extra 8.8 million premature deaths a year in 2015. This […]