Indians have the unhealthiest lungs in the world. This, doctors believe, can be directly attributed to the poor quality air that Indians are breathing.

Dr Salim Yusuf, professor of medicine at the McMaster University, arrived on the conclusion after conducting a year-long ground breaking study across seven centres in India while looking at lung functions of people living in seventeen countries. Lungs of Indians are 30 per less effective than those of Europeans who have been found enjoying the best health across all groups.

Dr Yusuf has blamed deteriorating outdoor and indoor air quality in India for this sorry state of affairs. New evidences bring to light that air pollution levels are not only causing respiratory disorders. But in recent years, medical fraternity has come around to believe that cardiac cases, cancer, mutagenic effects, diabetes, stroke and hyper-tension are directly linked to environmental and especially air pollution.
The study was presented at the American Thoracic Society meet 2011 held at Denver and though the abstract admits that genes and nutrition patterns vary in different ethnic groups, for the first time a direct co-relation has been drawn between poor environment and declining lung capacity.

Pune-based Dr Sundeep Salvi of the Chest Rese-arch Foundation (CRF), agrees that studies conducted by his own institute show that indoor air is probably more polluted than air being breathed out of doors. "We conducted an experiment which showed that the use of one mosquito coil for eight hours is equivalent to the smoking of 100 cigarettes. Experiments show that the smoke of agarbattis contains black tar," said Dr Salvi.

While the studies confirm that child asthma cases have doubled in the last five years, a separate study conducted by CRF on 16,000 children has shown a direct co-relation between asthma and truck traffic density.