9 Pollution
As Kurt Straif, PhD, head of the IARF Monographs Section, explained to the American Cancer Society, “Outdoor air pollution is not only a major environmental risk to health in general, it is the most important environmental cancer killer due to the large number of people exposed.”
According to the most recent data from the Global Burden of Disease project, 2016 saw 4.1 million premature deaths as the result of air pollution, with a majority of those deaths being due to lung cancer and chronic lung diseases.
