Pollution Kills More People Than All Wars And Violence, Accounting For 9 Million Deaths Globally!

As it turns out the ban on the sale of firecrackers comes as at a time when environmental pollution is at its worst. From from the filthy air to contaminated water;?pollution is killing more people every year than war or violence, smoking, hunger or natural disasters, AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined!

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One out of every six premature deaths in the world in 2015, which accounts for about 9 million deaths that could be attributed to disease from toxic exposure, according to a major study released Thursday in the Lancet medical journal.?

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According to the study, air pollution is the biggest contributor, linked to 6.5 million deaths in 2015 in the world while water pollution (1.8 million deaths) and workplace-related pollution (0.8 million deaths) pose the next largest risks.??

What’s worse is that India had the world's highest number of deaths due to air, water and other forms of pollution in 2015, according to the study. It claimed that pollution killed as many as 2.5 million people in the country!

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China's environment was the second deadliest, with more than 1.8 million premature deaths, or one in five, blamed on pollution-related illness, the study found.

Several other countries such Bangladesh, Pakistan, North Korea, South Sudan and Haiti also see nearly a fifth of their premature deaths caused by pollution.

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Here’s what else the study revealed:

-The financial cost from pollution-related death, sickness and welfare results in a colossal $4.6 trillion in annual losses or about 6.2 percent of the global economy, claims the report.?

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- Areas like Sub-Saharan Africa have yet to even set up air pollution monitoring systems. Soil pollution has received scant attention. And there are still plenty of potential toxins still being ignored, with less than half of the 5,000 new chemicals widely dispersed throughout the environment since 1950 having been tested for safety or toxicity.

- India has taken some recent actions, such as tightening vehicle and factory emission standards and occasionally limiting the number of cars on New Delhi's roads. But they have done little about crop burning, garbage fires, construction dust or rampant use of the dirtiest fossil fuels.

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-New Delhi woke up on Friday morning to acrid, smoke-filled skies and levels of dangerous?lung-clogging particulate matter known as PM2.5 that went beyond 900 parts per million, 90 times the recommended limit by the World Health Organization, and 22 times higher than India's own limits, despite the court ban on crackers.?

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- Even the conservative estimate of 9 million pollution-related deaths is one-and-a-half times higher than the number of people killed by smoking, three times the number killed by AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, more than six times the number killed in road accidents, and 15 times the number killed in war or other forms of violence, according to GBD tallies.

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- Experts say the 9 million premature deaths the study found was just a partial estimate, and the number of people killed by pollution is undoubtedly higher and will be quantified once more research is done and new methods of assessing harmful impacts are developed.

The study's conclusions on the economic cost of pollution measure lost productivity and health care costs, while also considering studies measuring people's "willingness to pay'" to reduce the probability of dying.

While these types of studies yield estimates at best, they are used by many governments and economists trying to understand how societies value individual lives.

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The World Bank in April declared that reducing pollution, in all forms, would now be a global priority. And in December, the United Nations will host its first conference on the topic of pollution.

"The relationship between pollution and poverty is very clear," said Ernesto Sanchez-Triana the lead environmental specialist at the World Bank. "And controlling pollution would help us address many other problems, from climate change to malnutrition. The linkages can't be ignored."