Where do children breathe the worst? Unfortunately in Europe
These children do not have a very lucky childhood. A big part of the year they breathe the air full of dust and dangerous pollutants. Almost forty per cent of them suffer because of it from a dangerous illness – asthma. We do not speak, nevertheless, about an industrial suburb of Chinese Beijing, a shanty town of Indian Bombaii or slums in Rio de Janeiro.
The children just in the centre of Europe suffer like that. The threatening situation repeats every year in two most affected quarters of Ostrava city in the north-east of the Czech Republic, not far from the frontiers with Poland. Scientists say that anywhere in the world Where do children breathe the worst? Unfortunately in Europethe concequences of air pollution do not have a worse impact on children´s health when it goes about breathing system illnesses and mainly asthma.
“I tried to find very carefully if there is a similar situation somewhere in the world. I have not found any resembling locality,“ thus the local media cited the chief of Ostrava children sickness rate research, Radim Sram from the Institute of Experimental Medicine of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. Just in South Korea, near a petrochemical plant, they had twenty-five per cent of asthmatic children.
The forty-per cent occurence of asthma at the children from the worst affected quarters of Ostrava represents a sad first place in Europe and in the world. The incidence of other illnesses is also high. Local doctors, for example, take care of a boy who was ill one hundred and eleven times during his first six years of the life.
The air pollution with dust and pollutants is mainly caused by local heavy industry. The situation is though worse than it was during the communist period. The people in Ostrava die a year and half earlier than during the totalitarian regime.
“The situation in Ostrava means a big failure of institutions and politics on the local and also European level. Hardly anynbody could believe something like that is possible in a EU member country,“ the situation was commented by Dalibor Dostal, the director of conservation organization European Wildlife.
The conservation organization therefore appeals for fast steps leading to the improvement of the situation in Ostrava region. At the same time they prepare the start of programme “Green Lungs of Europe“, the aim of which is to contribute to the decrease of dust and other pollutants concentration in the air thanks to new forests planting.
“The scientists research from the USA show that trees can help decrease asthma occurence of about twenty-five per cent. That is why we are trying to contribute this way to the improvement of the situation in Ostrava region. Of course, the reduction of emission from local industry factories is decisive,“ Dalibor Dostal added.
