Portal de Murcia
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The researcher at the University of Murcia Patricia Tarín has presented at the General Assembly of the European Union of Geophysical Sciences the results of her latest study, which determines the health effects of breathing the PM 2.5 pollutant.
This important assembly is being held in Vienna and is attended by more than 15,000 scientists from all over Europe.
The study carried out by Tarín determines that 600,000 people died from diseases caused by this particle between 1991 and 2010 throughout Europe.
Specifically, the research has focused on four causes of mortality: lung cancer, stroke, heart problems and respiratory problems.
"One of the conclusions we have reached is that the likelihood of suffering from these diseases from breathing this particulate matter increases the younger you are, those over 65 are less likely to have one of these diseases due to this cause, but when the develop, their mortality is greater ", explains the researcher at the University of Murcia.
This pollutant can reach the air through natural sources such as volcano emissions or desert clouds, but it is mainly found in the air by sources produced by man, as a result of traffic and the effects of energy production.
The inhabitants of large cities are the most exposed to particulate matter PM 2.5.
Children and pregnant women are two of the population groups most sensitive to its effects.
The research, developed as part of Tarín's doctoral thesis and carried out within the framework of the UMU Regional Atmospheric Modeling Group activity, has divided Europe into three broad areas to achieve more detailed results.
The issues that have been taken into account in this differentiation are the operation of the different health systems and the economy based on production through the use of fossil fuels, as well as their emissions in energy production.
With this premise, in the Eastern European region there would have been 370,000 of those 600,000 deaths;
in the Central region (Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries) 86,000 of the deaths are concentrated;
and in the Western region (France, United Kingdom, Portugal, Italy and Spain) the number of deaths from these four diseases reached 57,000 during the study period.
A pending future of renewable energies
Patricia Tarin also presented in Vienna the results of an estimate of the future of environmental health in these three regions as a result of the PM 2.5 pollutant effect for the period between 2031 and 2050. For this estimate, the researcher has used as a scenario the most catastrophic situation posed by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change.
"In this scenario, the mortality for this pollutant would increase in the countries of the East and in the countries of the Western region, while it would decrease in those of the Central region," says Tarín, who points out that this penalty for climate change the health of Europeans seems inevitable except for an intervention in favor of the development of renewable energies.
His next works are aimed at determining how the future scenario would change if there were greater investment in these clean energies.
Patricia Tarín is a graduate in Environmental Sciences from the University of Murcia and a PhD candidate.
Professor Pedro Jiménez is the director of his doctoral thesis.
Source: Universidad de Murcia
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