6 October – “Addressing Global Mortality From Fine Particle Air Pollution”
Date: 6 October 2017
Time: 12:00pm
Location: Baker 129 Conference Room
Speaker: Joshua Apte
Topic: Addressing Global Mortality From Fine Particle Air Pollution
Abstract: Ambient air pollution from fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is the largest environmental risk factor for premature mortality worldwide, and is associated with ~7% of all deaths worldwide. This seminar aims to illustrate the scale of the global air pollution mitigation challenge by asking three simple questions: “What populations breathe unhealthy air?”, “How is the burden of disease from air pollution distributed across the global population?”, and “By how much do we need to clean the world’s air — and where —in order to substantially ameliorate this problem?” Using data and methods from the Global Burden of Disease project, this seminar will demonstrate that the answers to these questions are sometimes unexpected. In particular, because the health effects of PM2.5 are likely to be non-linear over the global concentration range, there would be surprisingly large health benefits of improving air quality even in comparatively clean regions of the world.
