Comment by pjsousa79 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjsousa79 | Hacker News Reader

In 2019, ambient air pollution claimed the lives of young children at alarming rates in several countries. Here's the top 10 list of countries with the highest number of deaths per 100,000 children under 5 due to ambient air pollution: Nigeria – 18.95 Chad – 18.10 Sierra Leone – 12.02 Mali – 10.56 Guinea – 9.90 Niger – 9.64 Cote d'Ivoire - 9.04 Central African Republic - 8.79 Cameroon - 8.69 Burkina Faso - 8.68

These numbers highlight how air pollution isn't just an urban problem — it's a public health crisis in low-income countries where children are the most vulnerable.

Source: Baselight analysis using data from Our World in Data, originally supplied by the World Health Organization (WHO). https://baselight.app/u/pjsousa/query/top-10-countries-with-...

Not that this isn’t terrible, but those numbers look really low. Surely malnutrition and violence must be a hundred times more likely to kill them?

Not trying to say we shouldn’t consider this, but it seems like there’s bigger fish to fry first (assuming we can’t fry them all at the same time).

>Not that this isn’t terrible, but those numbers look really low. Surely malnutrition and violence must be a hundred times more likely to kill them?

They don't seem low at all to me. And a quick search suggests that malnutrition probably causes fewer deaths [1] (note that it's counted for all people here, not just under 5).

And in places like India and SEA, where malnutrition and violence are less of a problem, air pollution stands out even more.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/malnutrition-death-rates

Take Nigeria - capital is cca 6 million. That means, that every year around 1150 children die from just air pollution alone, every year.

That is properly fucked up for children under 5. They start with absolutely clean lungs and the damage compounds so much they die from it. Think about all the other age groups that have some other horrific numbers.

In 2022, the all-cause mortality under-5 was 117 per 1000 in Nigeria.

Not per 100k, per 1000.

That means that for every child that dies from air pollution, ~600 more die from some other cause.

To be fair, most causes seem related to terrible living conditions, so everything probably improves or degrades together.

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