This is what air pollution is doing to teenagers’ lungs, according to a chest surgeon

• Dr Arvind Kumar set up the Lung Care Foundation in India, after seeing first-hand the growing impact of air pollution on patients’ lungs.
• The chest surgeon is on a mission to spread the message that pollution kills through the Doctors for Clean Air movement.
• In this edited interview with the World Economic Forum, Dr Kumar explains what air pollution does to human health - and how to tackle it.

As a chest surgeon who looks underneath the skin, inside people’s bodies, Dr Arvind Kumar has a unique perspective on life. But what he sees every day on the lungs of patients in his home country, India, is alarming.

“When I operate, even on children, I see black deposits. There is a sea change in the demography of lung cancer: from smoking, it is moving more and more towards air pollution.

“This is a very serious development: from the pink lungs that we are born with, due to the impact of pollution, they become black. And as a chest surgeon, I see them everyday when I operate on these lungs.”

And it’s not a new phenomenon. Dr Kumar started seeing black deposits on the lungs of non-smokers a decade ago. He was so concerned, in 2015, he set up the Lung Care Foundation, and the?Doctors for Clean Air?movement, to raise?awareness of the impacts of air pollution?and care for the ‘2.6 billion lungs in India’.

Air pollution: The silent killer

Air pollution is a silent killer that?claims 7 million lives a year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). But it’s particularly harmful to young children because?they breathe faster, meaning they take in more pollutants, and their bodies are still developing.

More than half a million children under five died in 2016 from?respiratory infections caused by ambient and household air pollution, the WHO estimates.

And the risks start in unborn children, with foetuses exposed to pollution in their mother’s womb.

In November, a study published in Nature Communications found that in 2015, more than 40% of 2 million stillbirths in 137 countries - or more than 800,000 stillbirths - were the result of?exposure to ambient fine particles (PM2.5)?exceeding the WHO guideline of 10 μg/m3.

Two years before the global COVID-19 pandemic, the WHO held its first Global Conference on Air Pollution and Health, which launched with a report showing?93% of the world’s children under 15 are breathing such polluted air that their health and development is at risk.

Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said early exposure to air pollution was giving children a “life sentence of illness”.