The World Health Organization has announced that it has uncovered sufficient evidence to link diesel fumes with cases of cancer in human beings.
The organization, which operates under the United Nations, says that diesel fumes are a known cause of lung cancer and can increase the risk of bladder cancer.
The news is not all bad and diesel emissions have gotten progressively cleaner over the last few years. This is largely attributed to the adoption of particulate filters, of more precise direct-injection technologies and to the widespread use of ultra-low-sulfur diesel in the United States.
That is not the case in many developing countries, where there are still a lot of vehicles (mostly trucks) on the road that are powered by old-fashioned oil-burning engines that use prechamber-type indirect injection. To complicate the matter, the World Health Organization estimates that these vehicles will take a very long time to be replaced with cleaner ones.
“The scientific evidence was compelling and the working group’s conclusion was unanimous: diesel engine exhaust causes lung cancer in humans,” explained Dr. Christopher Portier, the chairman of the working group. “Given the additional health impacts from diesel particulates, exposure to this mixture of chemicals should be reduced worldwide.”
The World Health Organization’s working group also looked at exhaust fumes emitted by gasoline-burning engines but it decided that they were only possibly carcinogenic to humans. This rating hasn’t changed since 1989, when gas exhaust fumes were last evaluated.
A year prior to that, the working group had classified diesel exhaust fumes as “probably carcinogenic to humans”.
Photo by Ronan Glon.
