Pollution May Cause 40 Percent of Global Deaths

The Bush administration has lowered the value of a human life by $1 million dollars. So it may be cheaper to let us die than to protect the environment.

 

If you're genuinely concerned about pollution (a doubtful proposition, given your lack of actual interest in the prior topics you've posted), you might find the following of interest.

Crimes Against Nature, Rolling Stone Magazine

Bush is sabotaging the laws that have protected America's environment for more than thirty years
George W. Bush will go down in history as America's worst environmental president. In a ferocious three-year attack, the Bush administration has initiated more than 200 major rollbacks of America's environmental laws, weakening the protection of our country's air, water, public lands and wildlife...the White House has enlisted every federal agency that oversees environmental programs in a coordinated effort to relax rules aimed at the oil, coal, logging, mining and chemical industries as well as automakers, real estate developers, corporate agribusiness and other industries.
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[more at link above]
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I bought the book after attending one of his talks at Modesto Jr. College.

 

The article is almost completely irrelevant to the US experience.

Note that the number one killer was waterborne diseases. A huge problem in the 3rd world, not even a blip on the screen here. So, pollution in the form of bacterial and viral contamination of drinking water is what drives almost all the results.

In the US, almost all of us will die from slowly degenerative organ failures. That's the way we go here. In those cases, any effect of pollutants is a) hard to distinguish from aging, and b) would only result in a small addition to lifetime anyway. In a famous example published in The Lancet, if cancer were eliminated from the over-65 population entirely -- simply vanished as a cause of illness and death -- the life expectancy of the over-65 population would increase by an average of 9 months. That's because only 20% of the elderly die of cancer, and because most of the elderly have some other problems that would likely end their life within a modest number of years in any case.

The only thing that might be marginally relevant is the air pollution/lung disease link. There have been enough epidemiological studies (ie, of LA schoolchildren, of hospitalizations in the pacific northwest during winter air inversions) that the evidence of some harm is pretty compelling. Even then, the number of premature deaths that can be reasonably be attributed to air pollution here is pretty small.

I'll also note in passing the usual exaggerated headline: the article actually says 'contributes to', not 'cause', which in the case if health care is a significant difference.

 

My goodness! It's a wonder that any of our pre-pollution ancestors ever died at all.

 

Considering there's about 3-4 billion too many people on the planet today ...