Pollution caused 9 million deaths globally per year for 5 years, study says

In 2015, 1 in 6 deaths worldwide stemmed from poor air quality, unsafe water and toxic chemical pollution. That deadly toll — 9 million people each year — continued unabated through 2019, killing more people than war, terrorism, road injuries, malaria, drugs and alcohol.

The new findings, released Tuesday by the Lancet Planetary Health journal, shows that pollution continues to be the world’s largest environmental health threat for disease and premature deaths, with more the 90% of these deaths taking place in low- and middle-income countries.

Richard Fuller, the report’s lead author, said in an interview that “a lack of attention” accounts for why this grim tally continues unabated.

“There’s not much of an outcry around pollution ... even though, clearly, 9 million people dying a year is an enormous issue to be concerned about,” he said.

The analysis, which used 2019 data from Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries and Risk Factors, found that air pollution accounts for the vast majority of premature deaths, at 6.7 million. Water pollution accounted for 1.4 million deaths, while lead poisoning took close to a million lives. The report updates a similar analysis done by Fuller and his colleagues in 2015, which also found air and water pollution as the top offenders.

While the total number of pollution-related deaths has not changed in the past five years, the sources have shifted in some regions. In the past, most pollution deaths stemmed from indoor and household air pollution, caused by fine particles of soot released from indoor stoves burning wood or dung. Unclean water and untreated sewage also took more than a million lives.

Fuller said this source of pollution has decreased in recent years, as many households in China and India have switched to gas for cooking.

But that was about the only good news in the report. Instead of those traditional pollutants, fossil fuel burning, automobile combustion and toxic chemical pollution now pose a greater health risk in the developing world.

More than half of the countries and nations worldwide experienced more deaths from outdoor air pollution and toxic chemicals in 2019 than indoor air pollution and water contamination. More than 2 million people died from industrial and chemical pollution in China, for example, compared with about 367,000 from traditional sources.

In Africa, traditional pollutants still rank as the main cause of pollutionrelated disease and death, although industrial pollution is on the rise.

“When we’re seeing this increase in industrialization, we’re seeing increased urbanization, more people living in cities, and an aging population who are more vulnerable to the health impacts of air pollution,” said Neelu Tummala, a physician and co-director of the Climate Health Institute at George Washington University who was not involved in the study.

Fuller and his colleagues found deaths from these “modern” pollution sources increased by 7% from 2015 to 2019. Since 2000, they’ve skyrocketed by 66%.