Thick, smoky air from Canadian wildfires made for days of misery in New York City and across the U.S. Northeast this week. But for much of the rest of the world, breathing dangerously polluted air is an inescapable fact of life — and death.
Almost the entire world breathes air that exceeds the World Health Organization's air-quality limits at least occasionally. The danger grows worse when that bad air is more persistent than the nightmarish shroud that hit the U.S. — usually in developing or newly industrialized nations. That's where most of the 4.2 million deaths blamed on outdoor air pollution occurred in 2019, the UN's health agency reported.
