I note that the Times has dropped the 'premature', so now its 40K deaths per year. Wondered how long that would take.

The wilful and persistent inaccuracy of reporting tells us that this media campaign has nothing to do with reporting facts and reality.

This is pure and simple propaganda.

The report starkly sets out the dangerous impact air pollution is currently having on our nation’s health. Each year in the UK, around 40,000 deaths are attributable to exposure to outdoor air pollution which plays a role in many of the major health challenges of our day. It has been linked to cancer, asthma, stroke and heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and changes linked to dementia. The health problems resulting from exposure to air pollution have a high cost to people who suffer from illness and premature death, to our health services and to business. In the UK, these costs add up to more than £20 billion every year.

Royal College of Physicians

Air pollution both inside and out is an interesting thing. I'm not entirely convinced that things are worse now than they have been in the past for the advanced countries at least. I'd be very surprised if a modern gas or electrically heated home had more pollution than a solid fuel, be that coal, wood, peat or cow dung on an open fire in a possibly drafty house. The chimney was invented in the 12th century and not standard across the whole of the UK until the 20th.

Since the Clean Air Acts has air quality in cities deteriorated significantly? Anyone of my generation, born before the accession of the current monarch will remember city buildings being transformed by the removal of 100 years worth of soot.

I read years ago that lead from the Roman period can be detected in Greenland ice, and Egyptian mummies have teeth ground down by sand in their food and you have to think that saharan dust in the atmosphere is nothing new, so there's a long history of pollution. Today's situation isn't really out of the ordinary for city dwellers.

Spiegehalte is unhappy with this way of communicating the risk, not with the accuracy of the figures.

The correct scientific term would be QALDs Life Days Lost

This number (340,000 for particulates) is in the report, however as Spiegehalte notes:

None of these numbers are the ‘correct’ way of summarising the impact of a chronic hazard that tends to affect people who already have an illness, and the main conclusion is that many more than 29,000 [for particulates only] individuals are affected.

Medical errors? The Lancet burden of disease study reported these accounted for 142,000 deaths worldwide.

So we must be doing really badly.

Lovely straw man there Stew. The 40,000 stat comes from the RCP, and was publicised by Greenpeace, the word 'crisis' comes from UN special rapponteur Baskut Tuncak, who points out that most air quality zones in the UK breach legal limits and the government has twice had its plans to tackle the issue declared illegal by the courts.

I repeat, he does not regard the number as bogus; he takes issue with whether it is the best way of communicating the risk, and notes the high uncertainty. But that cuts both ways, the error bars mean the actual number for premature death from particulates alone could be as high as 60,000, implying a combined total from particulates and Nox of over 80,000.

So John Hopkins Medicine is a less authoritative resource of medical information than "The Lancet"?

Well, I was hoping you might be able to substantiate the 'Look a squirrel!' claim that there are more than 40,000 deaths annually from medical errors in the UK. Not sure a US based study (completely different systems, reporting etc, etc.) cuts it.

Plus, that study has been widely discredited. It examined hospital deaths only and concluded 251,000 deaths out of a total of 715,000 were due to medical error. That's 35% of inpatient mortality. You claim expertise in this area, do you regard that number as even remotely plausible?

Or did you just parrot it because (like the equally false Obama/Kenya claim) it confirmed your prejudices?

These stories all refer to an article last week in BMJ by Martin A Makary and Michael Daniel entitled “Medical error—the third leading cause of death in the US,” which claims that over 251,000 people die in hospitals as a result of medical errors. Given that, according to the CDC, only 715,000 of those deaths occur in hospitals, if Makary and Daniel’s numbers are to be believed, some 35% of inpatient deaths are due to medical errors. That’s just one reason why there are a lot of problems with this article, but there are even more problems with how the results have been reported in the press and the recommendations made by the authors.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/are-medical-errors-really-the-third-most-common-cause-of-death-in-the-u-s/

there are rather more people whose untimely demise can be directly attributed to medical mistakes than "air pollution

Fake noos, folks.

I didn't say 40K UK deaths d/t medical mistakes - so as usual GFY.

I cannot show you the numbers not killed by air pollution in the UK any more than you can show me those that are killedby air pollution. There are chronic and systemic problems with the ways categorisations and pathology results are reported plus further issues with the methodology deployed to generate the numbers which are then linguistically tortured to suit political purpose.

Did you read that blockquote copy before you pasted it? Do you think it actually makes any sense? Rather too much in the world of medical statistics is wonky and innumeracy in the medical profession is acknowledged as a problem in the BMJ and an assortment of American medical journals...

Surveys do hint that if you used the wider "lost quality life days" metric the medical mistake numbers are not trivial - go look for yourself. Then of course - why are the people in hospital in the first place? - and what metrics are applied to decide what constitutes a mistake?

There has been and continues to be quite a debate about the efficacy of medical intervention inside the medical profession - nothing to do with me... Some of the numbers are curious (embarrassing even) and hint that a careful re-factoring of some medical practice might be beneficial.

As for Obamah ... well - I never disputed that he was born in Hawaii - I said he was happy to not correct the impression in some quarters that he was Barack "from Kenya" and not Barry "from Honolulu" - for 10 years... Probably the least of his problems at the moment to be fair.

I didn't say 40K UK deaths d/t medical mistakes.

Well, that is the number being discussed for air pollution so when you <did write there are rather more people whose untimely demise can be directly attributed to medical mistakes than "air pollution" - it is kinda implied.

Just a fake news squirrel; the only evidence you have is a discredited study from the US, which came up with a number wildy at odds with the global conclusions from the Lancet.

Formal response to the John Hopkins study, extract

...the authors of the article do not provide any sort of formal methodology. Their estimate seems to rely on extrapolating preventable death rates from those reported in other studies. They then place the estimate derived from these heterogeneous studies in a “ranking” of causes of death in the US to make their argument that it is the third leading cause. These two steps are both precarious. The four studies on which they appear to base their estimate on use different methodologies and wildly varying definitions that Makary and Daniel collapse into their vividly-titled construct of “preventable lethal adverse event”. It is not clear how the “point estimates” they derive were calculated, but it is notable that the denominators across the studies are not comparable and no confidence intervals are reported.

The authors call for death certificates to include an extra field asking whether a preventable complication stemming from the patient’s medical care contributed to the death. The practical details of how this might be achieved are scant. Causes listed on death certificates already represent educated guesses much of the time, as not many patients die of diagnoses supported by gold standard tests during life (or autopsy results after death[3]) Moreover, the doctor who pronounces death (and thus fills out the death certificate) may be ill-placed to know whether the patient experienced a preventable complication in care. But, suppose we sidestepped these practical issues (and put aside questions of resources) to implement a system whereby at least two clinicians not based at the hospital where death occurred undertake an independent medical record review and then discuss the case in order to reach consensus about whether or not medical error had likely contributed to death.

As it turns out, this approach has been implemented in research settings on at least three occasions.[4-6] In all of these studies, the authors sampled deaths from multiple institutions and asked trained reviewers to look over the cases to identify possible quality of care problems and to make a judgment about the preventability of death. In all three studies, reviewers estimated that around 3% to 5% of deaths were ‘probably preventable’ (a greater than 50% chance that optimal care would have prevented death). The largest and most recent of these studies[5] reported that trained medical reviewers judged 3.6% of deaths to have at least a 50% probability of avoidability. Applying this rate of preventability to the total number of hospital deaths in the US each year produces an estimate of about 25,200 deaths annually that are potentially avoidable among hospitalized patients in the US—roughly 10-fold lower than the estimate advanced by Makary and Daniel.

Flaky study, fake news.