Air pollution killing 4,000 people a day in China, says US report

Air pollution is killing about 4,000 people in China a day, accounting for one in six premature deaths in the world's most populous country, a study has found.

Physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, calculated that about 1.6 million people in China die every year from heart and lung problems and strokes because of incredibly polluted air, mainly from small particles.

Earlier studies put China's annual air pollution death toll at one to two million, but this is the first to use newly released Chinese air monitoring figures.

The study blamed emissions from the burning of coal, both for electricity and heating homes. The study, to be published in the journal PLOS One, uses real air measurements and computer model calculations that estimate heart, lung and stroke deaths for different types of pollutants.

The study's lead author, Dr Robert Rohde, said 38 per cent of China's population lived in an area with a long-term air quality average that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) called unhealthy.

"It's a very big number," he said. "It's a little hard to wrap your mind around the numbers. Some of the worst in China is to the southwest of Beijing."