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And if nothing is done, the annual toll from dirty air may double to 6.6 million premature deaths by 2050, with the biggest rise coming in Asia, researchers said Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“Everybody breathes the ambient air, so it affects everyone, so even small risks can translate into major burdens of disease”, says Michael Jerrett from the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a commentary...

So for this study, Lelieveld’s team combined a global atmospheric chemistry model with population data and health statistics to estimate the relative contribution of different kinds of outdoor air pollution, mainly from so-called fine particulate matter, to premature deaths.

Researchers considered the levels of air pollution in states and cities using data from the EPA, and compared them with health statistics from each of the locations. They found that even minuscule increases in the amount of these particles (by 10 micrograms per cubic meter of...