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Over 90 per cent of the global deaths per year linked to air pollution from landscape fires were in low and middle-income countries, including India, according to a study published in The Lancet journal. Other countries with the highest burdens of disease due to landscape fires, including wildfires, were China, Indonesia and those in the sub-Saharan Africa. The findings highlighted geographic and socioeconomic inequalities in how landscape fires affect public health, an international team of researchers, including those from Monash University, Australia, found. Landscape fires occur in natural and built-up settings and can include both forest fires and those caused due to human activities. Most of the resulting deaths are related to the air pollution caused due to such fires, contributing to long-term cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses. The study attributed roughly 0.45 million deaths a year to heart-related conditions and about 0.22 million deaths annually to respiratory ...
Only one in three people in low-and middle-income countries had access to safe drinking water in 2020, a new analysis of 135 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has estimated. Using models, researchers from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, combined household surveys with global Earth observation, including satellite, air, and land data, on human, geographic, and environmental factors. They, thus, created detailed maps of safe drinking water use across 135 LMICs. Their analysis is published in the journal Science. The authors estimated that despite 88 per cent of the people living in the LMICs using an improved drinking water source, defined as having "the potential to deliver safe water," almost half the population were estimated to be exposed to faecal contamination. As such, more than 4.4 billion people in poorer countries lack safe drinking water. This is roughly twice the estimate of 2 billion people in 2020 given by the World Health Organization and United Nations (UN) Children's