In 2105 the scandal broke out, baptized journalistically as ‘Dieselgate’: the Volkswagen automobile consortium admitted that it had manipulated the engines of its diesel vehicles with a computer program in order not to exceed the maximum emission values set by the European authorities in the controls. And the trap seems to be coming out against the health of Europeans. A new report puts in figures, always according to statistical estimates, the premature annual deaths that it has caused in the European Union, Norway and Switzerland: 4,560 . The study, carried out by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria and the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, is published in the specialist journal Environmental Research Letters .
According to the researchers, since the 1990s the number of diesel vehicles on the streets and highways of Europe has increased by 50%. There are currently 100 million cars that incorporate these engines, which is twice as many as in the rest of the world as a whole. The problem is that their combustion is more harmful than that of gasoline vehicles, especially due to the harmful effects of nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions in the respiratory tract and cardiovascular system.
Italy, the worst stop
The new study estimates that the NOx released into the atmosphere by the exhaust pipes of diesel cars claimed the lives of 9,803 Europeans each year, but could have been limited to 5,270 if the new models had met the established controls . These vehicles emit between 4 and 7 times more nitrogen oxides than what was marked in the previous tests (rigged) of the manufacturers. In addition, “if all diesel cars were gasoline, about 7,500 of those premature deaths – three-quarters – would have been avoided,” says Jens Borken-Kleefeld, transport expert at IIASA. In other words, the figure would go from almost 10,000 to only 2,230.
The countries hardest hit by deaths from excess NOx emissions are Italy (1,250 deaths), Germany (960) and France (680 ), while at the bottom of the list are Norway, Finland and Cyprus. In the last three countries, in fact, the risk of losing your life from this cause is at least 14 times lower than the average of the European Union, according to the study.
With regard to Spain, which ranks seventh in Europe in the annual number of deaths attributed to Dieselgate, it stands at 170, out of a total of 370 that produce NOx emissions. As can be seen in the map that the experts have drawn up, the problem particularly affects Catalonia , where a kind of stain appears that encompasses the urban conglomerate of Barcelona and its ramifications towards the provinces of Barcelona and Tarragona.
The report also notes that polluted air in general , produced by gas emissions from transport, industry and other sources, kills around 425,000 people prematurely in the 28 countries of the European Union, Norway and Switzerland.
