Air Pollution Affecting People’s Health More Than Tobacco Smoke: Dr Randeep Guleria

Air pollution in Delhi-NCR, where the air quality has slipped to 'severe' category, is affecting people's health more than tobacco smoke, Dr Randeep Guleria said.

New Delhi: Air pollution in Delhi-NCR, where the air quality has slipped to ‘severe’ category, is affecting people’s health more than tobacco smoke, Dr Randeep Guleria, the former AIIMS director, said.

“It is causing more disability than even tobacco smoke. We talk a lot about smoking, but not about using tobacco. But now the burden of disability has shifted more towards air pollution and even that is causing a big problem than as compared to smoking,” Dr Randeep Guleria said.

Dr Randeep Guleria said, “So unfortunately the AQI is at severe range and we’ve seen that every year. There have been times when it went up to 900 in the last few years. The concern of course, is that it has a huge health impact. A paper published in 2017, suggested that in India every year, more than 1.24 million people die because of air pollution. So it’s huge mortality that we see it causes huge disability. Many people have a problem.”

A thick layer of smog blanketed Delhi on Friday as the city’s air quality remained in the “severe” zone for the second consecutive day, primarily due to unfavourable meteorological conditions and raging farm fires in Punjab. At 4 pm, Delhi’s 24-hour average Air Quality Index (AQI) stood at 447. The concentration of lung-damaging fine particles, known as PM2.5, was above 470 micrograms per cubic metre, around eight times above the safe limit of 60 micrograms per cubic metre, in many areas.