Claim Your Right To Breathe Cleaner Air

There are ideas that are repeated as if they were unappealable truths and they are not. “We will live longer and longer.” Really? Everyone and everywhere or just some? It is true that in recent decades life expectancy has increased in developed countries, but is it true that this will continue to be the case or do we want to convince ourselves of this?

Dr. María Neira is one of the few voices that dares to warn us that, in reality, “it is likely that our children live less than us” and she does so from the knowledge acquired over 12 years at the head of the department of Public Health and Environment of the World Health Organization.

María Neira, born 58 years ago in La Felguera, Asturias, worked in the refugee camps of Doctors without Borders in Honduras, and of UNHCR in Mozambique and Rwanda. For 12 years she has been the director of the Department of Public Health and Environment of the World Health Organization.

Its objective is to defend the health of all against threats such as hunger, asbestos, mercury and, now especially, pesticides, added sugar and climate change. Currently its biggest workhorse is air pollution.

Our health is that of the planet: if it becomes contaminated, you too

The real threats to children and young people are formidable. Neira says that “our health depends on that of the planet” and that the increase in various types of pollution means that the outlook is far from rosy.

“Pollution already occupies the most important space as an environmental and social determinant of health. It represents 25 percent of morbidity and mortality and claims more than 6 million deaths a year, which have to do with the lack of drinking water and air pollution, also with pesticides and other chemical agents, “he said in an interview with the Medical Journal.

Many cities are unbreathable

That is why one of his main objectives as WHO leader is to reduce air pollution at all costs. His data are incontestable: “90 percent of the world’s population breathes air that is below the quality standards that we have determined in the WHO. There are cities where you can no longer breathe.”

Poor air quality severely damages the lungs and contributes to increased strokes, lung cancer, and asthma. It also affects the brain and the immune and endocrine systems.

In a tweet, Neira offered hard data : “The world’s biggest killers are cancer, diabetes, lung disease and heart disease. Air pollution is the second biggest contributor to these killers (after tobacco).”

We have to be more aware

Doctors must inform. “The day that mothers know that their children’s asthma is the result of this air pollution, we will have a revolution that could be very positive,” he adds. Doctors, he says, do not have to settle for treating diseases, they must be avoided with prevention.

In China, the government has been forced to make the fight against pollution a priority. It is also true that they found that some multinationals did not want to settle there, because the executives knew that in a few years their children would have lost a few months of life.

As the situation in European countries does not seem so serious, awareness of the problem has not caught on. However, a new data from Neira makes us land: “due to pollution, in Europe 400,000 people die every year “.

Let’s start by changing the diet

Given the right information, parents would also change their eating habits at home and away. Neira is very clear: “we must decide if we want to continue using food to destroy our health or not.” They would stop, for example, drinking soft drinks almost daily, because if they drink it they will have a serious problem when they are adults.

“With obesity we are destroying ourselves”, says Neira, because behind are type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, chronic hypertension …

You have to put taxes on sugar

But all the responsibility cannot fall on the family. That is why Neira works in favor of companies committing to health and governments taking measures such as imposing taxes on sugary drinks.

Also remember that you should reduce the consumption of processed and red meat, declared carcinogenic and probably carcinogenic by the WHO two years ago.

The policies we need

The public policies that must change, according to Neira, are those that govern energy production, urban planning, transportation, the emission of air pollutants and food production. This is the political agenda that should concern us.

For Neira, the interest of health, and not exclusively the economic one, should inspire all public policies and together define a model of sustainable development.

Of all these factors, Neira draws attention especially to the type of energy we want to have. Adopting sustainable, clean and affordable energy would have a major impact on health.

Doctors must participate

If health professionals and authorities dedicated a very small part of their effort to influence with solid scientific arguments on healthy urban planning or energy production, or to force measures on nutrition, for example, the return in an improvement in health would be huge, according to Neira.

Acting on these grounds is the only way to go to the source and correct the true causes of many diseases.