Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether attributable deaths is an alternative term used for premature deaths when referring to deaths caused by air pollution.

Long-term exposure to air pollution is understood to contribute to the risk of dying from certain conditions. The annual number of attributable deaths associated with long-term average concentrations of pollutants is not an estimate of the number of people whose untimely death is caused entirely by air pollution. Instead, it is a way of representing the effect of air pollution across the whole population.

In public health, ‘premature deaths’ is usually used to refer to deaths that occur before the average age of death in a population, before the age of 75 years old. This is not the same as ‘attributable deaths’, which represent the total mortality effect across the whole population, including those over 75 years old. It is likely that deaths attributable to air pollution will be disproportionately influenced by deaths at older ages, such as from cardiovascular and respiratory disease.