POLLUTION AND HEALTH METRICS: Global, Regional, and Country Analysis- December 2019

Pollution is an enormous and poorly addressed health problem. In October 2017, The Lancet Commission on pollution and health quantified the human toll of worldwide pollution—9 million premature deaths a year. The data for that analysis was from 2015. This report updates those results with the most recent dataset—2017—and also breaks down the results by country, enabling us to rank the best and worst performers in each region.

The new data shows pollution still to be the largest environmental cause of premature death on the planet, killing 8.3 million people in 2017, or nearly one death in seven. These deaths are caused by exposure to toxic air, water, soil, and chemical pollution globally. The results are still conservative, as many known toxins are not included in the analysis. This report draws its data from the Institute for Health Metric’s (IHME’s) 2017 Global Burden of Disease Study.

The full Global Alliance on Health and Pollution report can be found at this link.