NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Diseases like ebola, HIV, and malaria rightly get a lot of a headlines, because they can kill millions of people very quickly. But there’s another problem that affects even more people, and it’s not mentioned as much: pollution.

In all, pollution kills 8.9 million people a year, according to a new report, and as many as 200 million people suffer pollution-related health problems, including brain damage from exposure to lead, mercury, and pesticides.

From Ghana to Kyrgyzstan, there are still thousands of appallingly polluted places, from electronic waste dumps to toxic old factories where chemicals continue to seep into the ground. One 2013 study of 373 sites in India, Indonesia and the Philippines estimated that 8.5 million people were at risk of serious disease—the equivalent burden of malaria and outdoor pollution combined.