The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) have warned that UK dirty air is causing health harm to almost every organ in the body, even at low concentrations.
In their latest report, which is titled: A breath of fresh air: responding to the health challenges of modern air pollution, experts have found that air pollution in the UK is costing over £500m a week in ill health, NHS care and productivity losses. What’s more, 99% of the population have been found to be breathing in ‘toxic air’.
These findings, however, aren’t new. The report comes nine years after RCP published their report Every breath we take: the lifelong impact of air pollution, which highlighted very similar issues.
In the foreword of the latest study, Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, said: ‘Air pollution remains the most important environmental threat to health, with impacts throughout the life course.
‘It is an area of health where the UK has made substantial progress in the last three decades, with concentrations of any of the main pollutants falling rapidly, but it remains a major cause of chronic ill health as well as premature mortality.’
To give context, the report found air pollution in the UK now takes the lives of 30,000 people and costs £27bn a year. This figure could be considered even higher if wider impacts, including dementia, were factored in.
Following the publication of the research, which can be found here, Dr Mumtaz Patel, president of the RCP, has deemed air pollution as a ‘public health crisis’.
She said: ‘We are losing tens of thousands of lives every year to something that is mostly preventable and the financial cost of a price we simply cannot afford to keep paying.
‘We wouldn’t accept 30,000 preventable deaths from any other cause. We need to treat clean air with the same seriousness we treat clean water or safe food. It is a basic human right – and a vital investment in our economic future.’
To keep up with Clean Air Day news, our sister title Air Quality News is providing full coverage.
Photo by Janusz Walczak via UnSplash
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