Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Escalating health risks associated with ambient ozone (O 3 ) pollution presents a pressing challenge to global population well-being. An ever-increasing body of evidence supports an association between O 3 pollution and cardiorespiratory conditions. However, previous studies only consider exposure-attributable respiratory deaths, completely disregarding O 3 -induced cardiovascular mortality. An updated estimate is urgently needed to accurately assess O 3 -associated risks. Here, we integrate multiple well-developed high-resolution O 3 concentration databases to track population exposure between 1990 and 2019. We pool up-to-date concentration-response relationships to estimate cardiovascular premature mortality burden attributable to O 3 , which increased globally from 404,200 (95% uncertainty interval UI 216,400–605,200) in 1990 to 581,900 (95% UI 306,300–905,800) in 2019. The analysis confirms that O 3 -related health burden is substantially underestimated in previous research. Our results further reveal that rural residents were exposed to 7.7 ± 1.8 ppb higher O 3 than urban citizens over the past 30 years, uncovering a long-overlooked issue of urban-rural environmental injustice. More control efforts should be directed to highly O 3 -polluted rural areas, especially in regions with high cardiovascular incidences.
Sun et al. (Mon,) studied this question.