Pollution 'hits rural poor hardest'

Many poor children die from breathing infections

By the BBC's Elizabeth Blunt

The World Health Organisation has called for the creation of an international database on air pollution and its effects on health, arguing that this is necessary to get member states to take the issue seriously.

A deadly combination of solid fuel, inefficient stoves and poor ventilation triggers off a complex mix of health-damaging pollutants in homes

WHO statement

A statement issued in Geneva after a stategy meeting on air quality and health said that as many as one billion people round the world are regularly exposed to pollution levels up to 100 times more than WHO guidelines.

The startling message is that the people most at risk from air pollution are not living in industrialised countries, exposed to traffic fumes and the smoke from factories and reineries.

The worst sufferers live in rural villages in third world countries. They may be a world away from the visible kinds of industrial pollution, but they live, day in and day out, in the smoke and fumes of cooking and heating fires in cramped and unventilated houses.

WHO wants evidence

Most vulnerable of all are women and young children, since they spend the most time in smoky kitchens, where cooking is done over fires of wood, coal, charcoal, crop wastes or dung.

In a statement published at the end of the meeting, the WHO says that what it calls "a deadly combination of solid fuel, inefficient stoves and poor ventilation triggers off a complex mix of health-damaging pollutants in homes."

It estimates that in India, where 80% of households use solid fuel, about 500,000 children a year die as a result, mostly from acute respiratory infections.

The figure in sub-Saharan Africa is similar, and the problem also exists in Latin America, although on a smaller scale.

What the WHO says it now wants to do is to provide its members states with irrefutable evidence that air pollution is causing a disproportionately heavy burden of disease.

In this way, they can plan a strategy to reduce the burden in a cost-effective way.