Picturing air pollution isn’t hard in a world where 99% of people breathe polluted air. While reading this, you’re probably mentally visualizing an outdoor urban area with factories leaking out dense, dark smoke or intense car traffic releasing dirty fuels in rush hour. But although our immediate association of pollution tends to lean on the outdoors, the issue goes way beyond external environments.
Household air pollution is a silent and often neglected threat that causes about 3.2 million deaths in the world every year, according to World Health Organization (WHO) estimates. That corresponds to nearly half of the 6.7 million annual deaths worldwide attributable to air pollution. Among all lethal illnesses associated with household air pollution exposure, the organization points out that ischaemic heart disease accounts for 32% of the 3.2 million annual deaths, followed by stroke, pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer.
