NEW DELHI: New Delhi recorded more than 200,000 cases of acute respiratory illnesses at six state-run hospitals between 2022 and 2024, government numbers showed, highlighting the adverse effects of toxic air on health.
Delhi, with its sprawling metropolitan region of 30 million residents, is regularly ranked among the world’s most polluted capitals.
India’s health ministry told parliament on Tuesday that air pollution was one of the triggering factors for respiratory ailments.
“Analysis suggests that increase in pollution levels was associated with increase in number of patients attending emergency rooms,” junior health minister Prataprao Jadhav said in a written reply.
More than 30,000 people with respiratory illnesses had to be hospitalized in the three years.
Acrid smog blankets Delhi’s skyline each winter, when cooler air traps pollutants close to the ground, creating a deadly mix of emissions from crop burning, factories and heavy traffic.
Levels of PM2.5 — cancer-causing microparticles small enough to enter the bloodstream — sometimes rise to as much as 60 times the UN’s daily health limits.
A study in The Lancet Planetary Health last year estimated that 3.8 million deaths in India between 2009 and 2019 were linked to air pollution.
The United Nations children’s agency warns that polluted air puts children at heightened risk of acute respiratory infections.
The health ministry, however, added that air pollution could not alone be blamed for the hospitalizations.
“Health effects of air pollution are synergistic manifestation of factors which include food habits, occupational habits, socio-economic status, medical history, immunity, heredity, etc,” it said.
New Delhi records over 200,000 respiratory illness cases due to toxic air
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New Delhi records over 200,000 respiratory illness cases due to toxic air
- New Delhi is regularly ranked among the world’s most polluted capitals
- Air pollution was one of the triggering factors for respiratory ailments
End of US-Russia nuclear pact a ‘grave moment’: UN chief
- Guterres urged Washington and Moscow “to return to the negotiating table without delay and to agree upon a successor framework”
UNITED NATIONS, United States: UN chief Antonio Guterres on Wednesday urged the United States and Russia to quickly sign a new nuclear deal, as the existing treaty was set to expire in a “grave moment for international peace and security.”
The New START agreement will end Thursday, formally releasing both Moscow and Washington from a raft of restrictions on their nuclear arsenals.
“For the first time in more than half a century, we face a world without any binding limits on the strategic nuclear arsenals of the Russian Federation and the United States of America,” Guterres said in a statement.
The UN secretary-general added that New START and other arms control treaties had “drastically improved the security of all peoples.”
“This dissolution of decades of achievement could not come at a worse time — the risk of a nuclear weapon being used is the highest in decades,” he said, without giving more details.
Guterres urged Washington and Moscow “to return to the negotiating table without delay and to agree upon a successor framework.”
Russia and the United States together control more than 80 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads but arms agreements have been withering away.
New START, first signed in 2010, limited each side’s nuclear arsenal to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads — a reduction of nearly 30 percent from the previous limit set in 2002.
It also allowed each side to conduct on-site inspections of the other’s nuclear arsenal, although these were suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic and have not resumed since.
