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Reuters
KANPUR
In the world's most polluted city, Kanpur in northern India, the biggest hospital is so overcrowded with patients with respiratory ailments that they are often bedded in the ophthalmology ward.
Kanpur, home to 3 million people, is followed by 13 other Indian cities in a list of the places with the worst air in the world, according to rankings released this month by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Prem Singh, head of the department of medicine in Kanpur's Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi Memorial Medical College, said the number of patients the hospital receives with respiratory illnesses has more than tripled over the past five years to 600 a month, most of them children and people over 50 years old.
"Every week a lung cancer patient walks in; earlier we would get one in three months,"said Singh.
"Problems from air pollution are on the rise and leading to multiple diseases such as bronchial asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pneumonia."
In the adjoining room, a 45-year old man lay gasping as his family members circled around him amid the stench and dust. A doctor attending to him said the man was suffering from chronic respiratory disease, partly due to air pollution, that had destroyed one of his lungs.
The corridors of the hospital, one of the biggest in the country's most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, are packed with patients and their families, laid on mats or squatting in groups.
The WHO ranking is based on 2016 data from the Central Pollution Control Board on the amount of particulate matter (PM) under 2.5 micrograms - the smallest, most dangerous particles that can lodge deep in the lungs - found in every cubic metre of air.
The WHO says globally about 7 million people die every year from breathing polluted air that can lead to heart disease, stroke and lung cancer. Most of the deaths happen in poor Asian and African countries.
Kanpur's chief pollution officer, Kuldeep Misra, rejected the tag of the world's most polluted city.
"If the situation was as bad as the WHO describes, we would have been dead by now,"he said in an interview in his office.
