New study warns about the impact of China’s cola dependancy on life expectancy. Creative Commons: Leo Fung, 2010 Coal pollution is shortening the lives of people living in northern China by around 5.5 years, compared to south, according to a new study. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences , it found that nearly 500 million people living north of the Huai River will collectively lose an estimated 2.5 billion life years because of the pollution from widespread coal burning. This, the study says, is the disastrous legacy of a government policy which provided free coal to the north of the country in a bid to promote coal use and provide indoor heat for households. Environmental problems are a source of rising social discontent in China. Last month Beijing promised new measures to crack down on air pollution, partly by hastening a shift to renewable energy from fossil fuels. The report, by experts in China, the United States and Israel, said a communist policy of giving out free coal everywhere north of the Huai River in central China between 1950 and 1980 meant more heart and lung disease among 500 million people living in the area. “Life expectancies are about 5.5 years lower in the north owing to an increased incidence of cardio-respiratory mortality,” the researchers wrote in Tuesday’s edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Studying pollution and deaths in 90 cities, the experts found that life expectancy tumbled just north of the Huai River, where air pollution from burning coal was 55 percent higher than to the south between 1981 and 2000. “The analysis suggests that the Huai River policy, which had the laudable goal of providing indoor heat, had disastrous consequences for health,” the study said. It did not estimate how many lives the policy may have saved from winter cold. Read more: AlertNet >>
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