NEW DELHI: Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) is going to commission a study based on data from government hospitals across the country to get an accurate picture of health impact of air pollution. Reacting to a new study, Burden of Disease Attributable to Major Air Pollution Sources in India, by US-based Health Effects Institute, CPCB scientists said it was not tailored for Indian conditions.
The board is developing a statement of purpose, which will be ready in a month, for the long-term epidemiological study.
The study by Health Effects Institute referred to the Global Burden of Disease analysis for India, which said that air pollution contributed to more than 10% of the deaths in the country. In 2015, premature mortality attributed to air pollution contributed to nearly 1.1 million deaths, of which 75% were in rural areas. "Before arriving at any conclusion, we have to understand that their methodology and our methodology of evaluating health impacts can be very different. They are depending on extrapolated data. We, along with the ministry of health and family welfare, are developing a methodology for Indian conditions. We will characterise particulate matter, and there will be a monthly profile of PM levels and chemistry of particulates," said Dipankar Saha, head of CPCB's air lab, adding that "we will conduct a long-term exposure study".
Saha was speaking on the sidelines of CPCB's technical meet with the media on Thursday. CPCB member secretary A Sudhakar said, "Morbidity and mortality rates due to air pollution are being reported in the media without the knowledge of how these are being calculated. Many of these reports extrapolate data for the last 10 years...sometimes the gaps in the data are huge...there is no such study that tells us how much of it is directly caused by air pollution."
CPCB's 'Epidemiological study on effect of air pollution on human health in Delhi', published in 2012, stated that "there is increasing evidence to suggest that exposure to these pollutants elicits adverse health effects, often at levels well below the current WHO guidelines".
In August 2015, the environment ministry had told Parliament that more than 35,000 people had died due to acute respiratory infections across India between January 2006 and the middle of 2015, but did not attribute it directly to air pollution. However, the Global Burden of Disease report had found that exposure to PM2.5 may cause various diseases, including ischemic heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and stroke.
