Alex Trelinski
AIR pollution causes 60,000 admissions to Spanish hospitals every year especially with people who have serious pathologies and clinical conditions, according to a top scientist.
The claim comes from Julio Diaz from the Carlos III Health Institute who is a leading international expert on damage caused to the population by environmental toxins and the effects of climate change.
Diaz spoke at a conference held by the Spanish Society for Healthcare Quality (SECA) to warn politicians that they are not doing enough to combat pollution and its threat to health.
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He warned that while heat waves trigger some 1,200 hospitalisations per year in Spain and intense cold weather causes around 5,000, pollution causes 10 times more problems than the two climate issues combined.
Diaz said: “We are missing the point over the enormous damage to health caused by pollution.”
“It is strange that we have very good prevention plans for heat waves, but we do not have equivalent plans for pollution,” he added.
Diaz is one of the main advisors to the Ministry of Health over formulating annual plans against heat and the warning systems that support them.
Cristina Llinares, a colleague at the Carlos III Health Institute and co-director of the Health and Climate Change Observatory, also addressed the SECA conference.
She backed him up in saying that air and water pollution are two of the main health problems linked to climate change and they require measures to be taken to minimise their present and especially future danger.
Llinares stated that water pollution is responsible for an increase in gastrointestinal diseases and air pollution for the escalation of serious respiratory illnesses.
Different scientific studies estimate that deaths from pollution in Spain, especially from the inhalation of nitrogen dioxide and PM2.5 microparticles, from exhaust pipes and from the combustion of coal, wood and fossil fuels, may range between 10,000 and more than 20,000, without ruling out a higher figure.
The injuries they cause are not only respiratory pathologies and lung cancer, but also cardiovascular incidents, neurological diseases or premature births.
Both experts said that climate change was leading to an increase in tropical diseases in Spain like West Nile virus.
Julio Diaz called on new action plans to be created ‘urgently’.
He said plans must factor in strong risks like being poor, the poor quality of buildings or greater urban exposure to heat rises.
Jesus de la Osa, from Aragon’s Institute of Health Sciences, agreed with Diaz and said preventive plans against pollution and climate change have to reduce toxic emissions.
He added that programmes should focus on the most vulnerable groups and complement and coordinate national actions with regional and local initiatives.
