I was listening to NPR yesterday on my way into Marin and an author of a new book was talking about environment issues and how to get involved. She talked about habitat destruction, species loss, and a new one for me, death from air pollution. According to her 200 people in the United States die from air pollution per day. That didn't even pass a sniff test for me, so I decided to get another statistic and compare.
If you multiply out 200 * 365 you get 73,000. So there are 73,000 people in America dying per year because of bad air. Wow. Here is another statistic 5.6 people are murdered per 100,000 in the United States per year. Do the math and that is 16,240 people per year. So according to these figures four times as many people die from air pollution each year than are murdered. Wow!
In fact, given her numbers, air pollution kills twice as many people per year as breast cancer. Seems a little odd.
I love bad statistics.
Update: As I was taking the Online Traffic School course I was told that one person every 13 minutes dies in traffic accident. That's 110 a day. Still less than air pollution. ;-) This air pollution is shaping up to be America's #1 killer.
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