{"id":72,"date":"2018-11-14T09:19:17","date_gmt":"2018-11-14T09:19:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/?p=72"},"modified":"2019-03-18T06:27:19","modified_gmt":"2019-03-18T06:27:19","slug":"lifestyle-drift-air-pollution-and-the-world-health-organization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/2018\/11\/14\/lifestyle-drift-air-pollution-and-the-world-health-organization\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Lifestyle drift,\u2019 air pollution and the World Health Organization"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2013 the International Association for Research on Cancer (IARC), WHO\u2019s normally cautious cancer research arm, announced that it considers outdoor air pollution a Category 1 carcinogen<\/a> \u2013 that is, the category for which evidence of cancer-causing properties is strongest. \u00a0\u00a0(The full background monograph is available here<\/a>.)\u00a0 This turned out to be one of the most under-reported global health news stories of the new Millennium \u2013 like the estimate, the following year, that WHO considered air pollution responsible<\/a> for shortening the lives of seven million people worldwide.<\/p>\n

In 2016, a team of WHO researchers led by Annette Pr\u00fcss-Ust\u00fcn updated earlier estimates of the proportion of the global disease burden attributable to the environment, concluding that 23 percent of global deaths and 22 percent of global disability adjusted life years were attributable to environmental risks, although obviously only part of this toll reflects the impact of air pollution.\u00a0 (I\u2019m happy to say that we published a summary of this work<\/a> in the Journal of Public Health<\/em>.)\u00a0 Importantly, the authors made the point that environmental risks are not <\/em>primarily a problem of poor countries, or poor people: \u2018The lower people\u2019s socioeconomic status the more likely they are to be exposed to environmental risks, such as chemicals, air pollution and poor housing, water, sanitation and hygiene.\u2019\u00a0 This is certainly true of air pollution, with the highest annual mean concentrations<\/a> of fine particulate matter occurring in low- and middle-income countries, and the highest urban concentrations of those particulates<\/a> occurring in Indian cities, with high concentrations also observed in cities like Bamenda, Cameroon and Kampala, Uganda.<\/p>\n

WHO now appears to be taking air pollution much more seriously<\/a>.\u00a0 Unfortunately, its approach reflects the individualized, behavioural approach (‘lifestyle drift<\/a>‘) taken by the organization to noncommunicable diseases as a whole, as this screenshot from its website shows:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The solution to pollution is to hold your children up out of the car exhausts?\u00a0 Try exercising in less polluted areas?\u00a0 (If you live in London, maybe drive to Somerset for your jog?)\u00a0 One couldn\u2019t make this stuff up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2013 the International Association for Research on Cancer (IARC), WHO\u2019s normally cautious cancer research arm, announced that it considers outdoor air pollution a Category 1 carcinogen \u2013 that is, the category for which evidence of cancer-causing properties is strongest. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1834,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[21,18,19,20],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-air-pollution","tag-cancer","tag-lifestyle-drift","tag-world-health-organization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1834"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions\/103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/theodoreschrecker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}