A medical report has pointed to serious health threats from air pollution in smog-prone areas, and the northern region was found to be a hotspot for asthma and other major respiratory diseases.
The higher death rate from three main respiratory diseases – asthma, lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) – in the northern region, which was disclosed in the study on geographical inequalities of mortality in Thailand by Suchunya Aungkulanon’s research team, highlighted that health threats from air pollution are real.
The result of this study was related to reports about air pollution and asthma by World Health Organisation (WHO) and UN Environment on the occasion of World Asthma Day yesterday, which emphasised that air pollution was the major factor behind the severe asthma situation around the world.
The report, first published in the International Journal for Equity in Health in December 2016, revealed that from the study of standardised mortality ratio of 12 major health threats based on each locality in Thailand during the period from 2001 to 2014, it was found that there was a noticeable clustering of high mortality from asthma, lung cancer and COPD in almost every province in the northern region.
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