Asthma, strokes, lung cancer, diabetes... in a wide-ranging study published on Wednesday, January 29, the government agency Public Health France (SPF) assessed for the first time the health and economic impacts of air pollution in France. Beyond the impact on mortality, estimated by SPF at 40,000 deaths a year by 2021, the results highlight a "significant burden" of morbidity (several tens of thousands of new cases of disease every year) and economic costs, estimated at over €16 billion a year. The study also shows that a drastic reduction in air pollution to the levels recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) would prevent a large number of cases.

To carry out this quantitative assessment, which covers the period 2016-2019 (before the Covid-19 epidemic), the health authority focused on eight chronic diseases with a scientifically demonstrated link to the two most studied air pollutants (fine particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide). These include respiratory diseases (lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma in children and adults, and pneumopathy and other acute respiratory infections, excluding influenza), as well as cardiovascular diseases (stroke, myocardial infarction, hypertension) and metabolic diseases (type 2 diabetes).

The study shows that long-term exposure to ambient air pollution has a "considerable impact" on the appearance of new cases. In children, between 12% and 20% of new cases of respiratory disease (between 7,000 and almost 40,000 cases per year, depending on the disease and pollutant studied) are attributable to air pollution. In adults, the estimate varies between 7% and 13% of new cases of respiratory, cardiovascular or metabolic disease – between 4,000 and almost 78,000 cases a year, depending on the pathology taken into account and the type of pollution.

Urban zones

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