Residents of a fishing town in southwestern Iceland left their homes Saturday after increasing concern about a potential volcanic eruption caused civil defense authorities to declare a state of emergency in the region.

Police decided to evacuate Grindavik after recent seismic activity in the area moved south toward the town and monitoring indicated that a corridor of magma, or semi-molten rock, now extends under the community, Iceland’s Meteorological Office said. The town of 3,400 is on the Reykjanes Peninsula, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) southwest of the capital, Reykjavik.

“At this stage, it is not possible to determine exactly whether and where magma might reach the surface,” the Meteorological Office said.

Authorities also raised their aviation alert to orange, indicating an increased risk of a volcanic eruption. Volcanic eruptions pose a serious hazard to aviation because they can spew highly abrasive ash high into the atmosphere, where it can cause jet engines to fail, damage flight control systems and reduce visibility.

A major eruption in Iceland in 2010 caused widespread disruption to air travel between Europe and North America, costing airlines an estimated $3 billion as they canceled more than 100,000 flights.

The evacuation comes after the region was shaken by hundreds of small earthquakes every day for more than two weeks as scientists monitor a buildup of magma some 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) underground.

Concern about a possible eruption increased in the early hours Thursday when a magnitude 4.8 earthquake hit the area, forcing the internationally known Blue Lagoon geothermal resort to close temporarily.

The seismic activity started in an area north of Grindavik where there is a network of 2,000-year-old craters, geology professor Pall Einarrson, told Iceland’s RUV. The magma corridor is about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) long and spreading, he said.

“The biggest earthquakes originated there, under this old series of craters, but since then it [the magma corridor] has been getting longer, went under the urban area in Grindavík and is heading even further and towards the sea,” he said. 
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Hundreds of environmental activists marched in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, Saturday demanding drastic curbs on plastic production, ahead of a meeting to negotiate a global plastics treaty.

Representatives of more than 170 nations will meet in Nairobi Monday to negotiate what concrete measures should be included in a binding worldwide treaty to end plastic pollution.

Marchers waved placards reading “Plastic crisis = climate crisis” and “End multigenerational toxic exposure.”

They chanted “let polluters pay the price” as they walked slowly behind a ceremonial band from central Nairobi to a park in the west of the capital.

Nations agreed last year to finalize by 2024 a world-first U.N. treaty to address the scourge of plastics found everywhere from mountain tops to ocean depths and within human blood and breast milk.

Negotiators have met twice already but Nairobi is the first opportunity to debate a draft treaty published in September that outlines the many pathways to tackling the plastic problem.

The Nov. 13-19 meeting is the third of five sessions in a fast-tracked process aiming to conclude negotiations next year so the treaty can be adopted by mid-2025.

At the last talks in Paris, campaigners accused large plastic-producing nations of deliberately stalling after two days were lost debating procedural points.

This time around, the sessions have been extended by two days but there are still concerns a weaker treaty could emerge if time for detailed discussion is swallowed up going in circles.

Global plastic production has more than doubled since the start of the century to reach 460 million tons and it could triple by 2060 if nothing is done. Only nine percent is currently recycled.

Microplastics have been found everywhere from clouds to the deepest sea trenches, as well as throughout the human body.

The effects of plastics on human health remain poorly understood but there is growing concern among scientists.

Plastic also contributes to global warming, accounting for 3.4% of global emissions in 2019, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
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The proportion of U.S. kindergartners exempted from school vaccination requirements has hit its highest level ever, 3%, U.S. health officials said Thursday.

More parents are questioning routine childhood vaccinations that they used to automatically accept, an effect of the political schism that emerged during the pandemic around COVID-19 vaccines, experts say.

Even though more kids were given exemptions, the national vaccination rate held steady: 93% of kindergartners got their required shots for the 2022-23 school year, the same as the year before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report Thursday. The rate was 95% in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The bad news is that it’s gone down since the pandemic and still hasn’t rebounded,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, a University of Colorado pediatric infectious diseases specialist. “The good news is that the vast majority of parents are still vaccinating their kids according to the recommended schedule.”

All U.S. states and territories require that children attending child care centers and schools be vaccinated against a number of diseases, including, measles, mumps, polio, tetanus, whooping cough and chickenpox.

All states allow exemptions for children with medical conditions that prevents them from receiving certain vaccines. And most also permit exemptions for religious or other nonmedical reasons.

In the last decade, the percentage of kindergartners with medical exemptions has held steady, at about 0.2%. But the percentage with nonmedical exemptions has inched up, lifting the overall exemption rate from 1.6% in the 2011-12 school year to 3% last year.

Last year, more than 115,000 kindergartners were exempt from at least one vaccine, the CDC estimated.

The rates vary across the country.

Ten states — all in the West or Midwest — reported that more than 5% of kindergartners were exempted from at least one kind of required vaccine. Idaho had the highest percentage, with 12% of kindergartners receiving at least one exemption. In contrast, 0.1% had exemptions in New York.

The rates can be influenced by state laws or policies can make it harder or easier to obtain exemptions, and by local attitudes among families and doctors about the need to get children vaccinated.

“Sometimes these jumps in exemptions can be very local, and it may not reflect a whole state,” said O’Leary, who chairs an American Academy of Pediatrics committee on infectious diseases.

Hawaii saw the largest jump, with the exemption rate rising to 6.4%, nearly double the year before.

Officials there said it’s not due to any law or policy change. Rather, “we have observed that there has been misinformation/disinformation impacting people’s decision to vaccinate or not via social media platforms,” officials at the state’s health department said in a statement.

Connecticut and Maine saw significant declines, which CDC officials attributed to recent policy changes that made it harder to get exemptions.

Health officials say attaining 95% vaccination coverage is important to prevent outbreaks of preventable diseases, especially of measles, which is extremely contagious.

The U.S. has seen measles outbreaks begin when travelers infected elsewhere came to communities with low vaccination rates. That happened in 2019 when about 1,300 measles cases were reported — the most in the U.S. in nearly 30 years. Most of the cases were in were in Orthodox Jewish communities with low vaccination rates.

One apparent paradox in the report: The national vaccination rate held steady even as exemptions increased. How could that be?

CDC officials say it’s because there are actually three groups of children in the vaccination statistics. One is those who get all the shots. A second is those who get exemptions. The third are children who didn’t seek exemptions but also didn’t get all their shots and paperwork completed at the time the data was collected.

“Last year, those kids in that third group probably decreased,” offsetting the increase in the exemption group, the CDC’s Shannon Stokley said.
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Global cases of tuberculosis continued to rise last year, as disruption to health services caused by the COVID-19 pandemic set back efforts to fight the disease, according to the latest annual report from the World Health Organization. Henry Ridgwell reports.
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Iceland declared a state of emergency on Friday after a series of powerful earthquakes rocked the country’s southwestern Reykjanes peninsula in what could be a precursor to a volcanic eruption. 

“The National police chief … declares a state of emergency for civil defense due to the intense earthquake (activity) at Sundhnjukagigar, north of Grindavik,” the Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management said in a statement. 

“Earthquakes can become larger than those that have occurred, and this series of events could lead to an eruption,” the administration warned. 

The Icelandic Met Office (IMO) said an eruption could take place “in several days.” 

The village of Grindavik, home to around 4,000 people, is located some three kilometers (1.86 miles) southwest of the area where Friday’s earthquake swarm was registered. 

It has evacuation plans in place in case of an eruption. 

Thousands of tremors since October

Around 1730 GMT, two strong earthquakes were felt as far away as the capital Reykjavik some 40 kilometers away, and along much of the country’s southern coast, rattling windows and household objects. 

According to preliminary IMO figures, the biggest tremor had a magnitude of 5.2, north of Grindavik. 

Police closed a road running north-south to Grindavik on Friday after it was damaged by the tremors. 

Some 24,000 tremors have been registered on the peninsula since late October, according to the IMO, with “a dense swarm” of nearly 800 quakes registered between midnight and 1400 GMT Friday. 

The IMO noted an accumulation of magma underground at a depth of about five kilometers (3.1 miles). Should it start moving towards the surface, it could lead to a volcanic eruption. 

“The most likely scenario is that it will take several days rather than hours for magma to reach the surface,” it said. “If a fissure were to appear where the seismic activity is at its highest now, lava would flow to the southeast and to the west, but not towards Grindavik.” 

Nonetheless, the Department of Civil Protection said it was sending the patrol vessel Thor to Grindavik “for security purposes.” 

Emergency shelters and help centers were to open in Grindavik later Friday, as well as three other locations in southern Iceland, for information purposes and to assist people on the move. 

On Thursday, the Blue Lagoon, a popular tourist destination located near Grindavik famed for its geothermal spas and luxury hotels, closed as a precaution following another earthquake swarm. 

Also nearby is the Svartsengi geothermal plant, the main supplier of electricity and water to 30,000 residents on the Reykjanes peninsula. 

The plant has contingency plans in place to protect the plant and its workers in the event of an eruption. 

Since 2021, three eruptions have taken place on the Reykjanes peninsula, in March 2021, August 2022 and July 2023.  

Those three were located far from any infrastructure or populated areas. 

Cycle could could last decades, centuries

Iceland has 33 active volcanic systems, the highest number in Europe. 

The North Atlantic island straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a crack in the ocean floor separating the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates. 

Prior to the March 2021 eruption in an uninhabited area around Mount Fagradalsfjall, the Reykjanes volcanic system had remained dormant for eight centuries. 

Volcanologists believe the new cycle of increased activity could last for several decades or centuries. 

An April 2010 massive eruption at another Iceland volcano, the Eyjafjallajokull in the south of the island, forced the cancellation of some 100,000 flights, leaving more than 10 million travelers stranded. 
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Global cases of tuberculosis — also known as TB — continued to rise last year as disruption to health services caused by the COVID-19 pandemic set back efforts to fight the disease, according to the latest report from the World Health Organization.

Tuberculosis, an infectious disease that usually attacks the lungs, is both preventable and curable. It caused an estimated 1.3 million deaths in 2022 — a 19% drop from the year before, said the annual WHO report published last week.

However, there was a small increase in the number of global TB cases to an estimated 10.6 million. Some 40% of people living with TB are undiagnosed and untreated.

The disease is just behind COVID-19 as the world’s deadliest infectious illness, with India, Indonesia and the Philippines particularly affected.

COVID disruption

The COVID-19 pandemic, which began in 2020, saw health services overwhelmed in many parts of the world. TB diagnosis and treatment levels plummeted, said Dr. Lucica Ditiu, the executive director of the Geneva-based Stop TB Partnership.

“Unfortunately, the incidence of TB is growing. We used to have a decline of 2% per year. And then due to COVID, we have now an increase for the last two years — 2021 and 2022 — of almost 4%,” she told VOA.

The World Health Organization estimates COVID-related disruptions resulted in almost half a million excess deaths from TB in the three years from 2020 to 2022.

Childhood TB

The report also reveals a concerning lack of progress in some areas, according to Ditiu.

“We see … a pretty difficult situation for people with drug-resistant TB as well as childhood TB. So [with] drug-resistant TB, just short of 200,000 were diagnosed and put in treatment,” she said. “And exactly as the WHO said, two out of five people with drug-resistant TB had access to drug-resistant TB treatment. It’s actually the access to diagnosis which is limiting that.”

Ditiu said there are an estimated 1.3 million children with TB, about 12% of the world total. Children make up 16% of those who die from TB, she said.

Improved diagnosis

However, the focus on fighting tuberculosis appears to be getting back on track. The total number of cases diagnosed globally last year was 7.5 million, the highest ever recorded.

“This shows that the countries buckled up to recover after COVID – and even jump above the level before COVID,” Ditiu said.

Vaccine hopes

A promising TB vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline, known as M72, is currently in the final stage of trials. Sixteen other vaccines are undergoing earlier stages of testing.

“We need a vaccine. So that will be the game changer,” said Ditiu.

The 19% fall in deaths from TB from 2018 to 2022 is still far short of the World Health Organization’s target of a 75% reduction by 2025.

Funding also fell short, reaching less than half of the WHO target of at least $13 billion on TB diagnosis, treatment and prevention services in 2022.

Governments committed to spending $22 billion a year on TB by 2027 at a special U.N. meeting in September.
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The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration — NOAA — reports the U.S. has seen 25 separate weather or climate “disasters” — events causing damage or losses exceeding $1 billion — so far this year, the highest number since the agency began tracking such events 43 years ago.  

In a report issued this week, NOAA said severe thunderstorms moving through Oklahoma and other southern Plains states September 23 and 24 brought high winds and large hail, causing enough damage to rank as the 25th weather disaster so far in 2023. 

The agency said disasters through October of this year included 19 severe storms, two flooding events, a winter storm in the northeastern U.S., a drought and heat wave in the central and southern states, one wildfire (on Maui in August), and one tropical cyclone (Hurricane Idalia in Florida). 

NOAA said these events took the lives of 464 people and had a severe economic impact on the regions where they occurred. The total cost in damages from these events was more than $73 billion. The year-to-date tally exceeds 2020, which saw 19 disasters through October.  

NOAA reports the annual average number of such disaster events between 1980 and 2022 was 8.1 per year. The agency reports the annual average jumped in the most recent five years (2018-2022) to 18 disasters per year. 

Since 1980, the U.S. has sustained 373 separate weather and climate events resulting in overall damages or costs reaching or exceeding $1 billion, according to NOAA. The total cost of these 373 events exceeds $2.645 trillion. 
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U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said talks this week with his Chinese counterpart resulted in “some agreement” on climate issues that leave him optimistic about the U.N. climate summit scheduled for later this month in Dubai. 

Speaking at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore, Kerry said Friday that he met for four days this week with Chinese climate envoy Xie Zhenhua in California. He described their talks as “productive” and, without providing details, said they had reached “some agreement on reducing emissions and the direction we have to go.” 

Kerry said, “I am hopeful about that,” adding that details of the agreements would be released soon. 

The U.N. Climate Change Conference, known as COP28, is scheduled for the end of this month. The climate conference seeks to meet and expand on climate goals established during the Paris agreement of 2015, in which some 200 nations agreed to limit the rise of global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or about pre-industrial age levels. 

Kerry said the goal, as in the previous climate conferences, “is to open up the opportunity to keep 1.5 degrees alive.” 

Any agreements between the United States and China — the world’s two largest polluters — would be integral to the success of the conference. 

The U.S. climate envoy said the use of fossil fuels — coal in particular — is likely to be a central part of the discussion at the conference. China is the world’s largest user of fossil fuels and relies on coal for most of its energy production. 

In comments at the Singapore forum Friday, Kerry said, “It is irresponsible to be funding or building a coal-fired power plant anywhere in the world. And who is allowed to get away with doing that, when it is not the only option for what we could be doing.” 

Reuters reports Xie told a diplomatic climate forum in September that phasing out fossil fuels is “unrealistic” for China. 

Some information for this report was provided by Reuters and Agence France-Presse. 
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Warmer ocean temperatures are hurting coral reefs off the U.S. state of Florida. For VOA, Genia Dulot took a look at what’s happening underwater.
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Rain in New Delhi and its suburbs brought relief Friday morning to the Indian capital, where authorities were mulling seeding clouds to improve the toxic air gripping the city.

New Delhi, which was the most polluted in the world until Thursday, saw its air quality index (AQI) improve to 127 early Friday – a welcome change from the “hazardous” 400-500 level seen during the past week, according to the Swiss group IQAir.

India’s weather department has forecast intermittent rain over the city and adjoining areas until early noon on Friday. Light showers are also expected in neighboring states like Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan.

On Friday morning, New Delhi was the 10th most polluted city in the world, while Kolkata, in India’s east, topped the global chart with an AQI of 303.

Meanwhile, air in the financial capital of Mumbai has markedly improved due to showers in nearby coastal areas.

This year, attention on the worsening air quality has cast a shadow over the cricket World Cup hosted by India.

Scientists and authorities were planning to seed clouds in New Delhi around Nov. 20 to trigger heavy rain, the first such attempt to clean the air.

A thick layer of smog envelops the city every year ahead of winter as heavy, cold air traps dust, vehicle emissions and smoke from burning crop stubble in Punjab and Haryana.

Friday’s rain comes two days before the Diwali festival, when many people defy a ban on firecrackers, causing a spike in air pollution.

The local government of the city of 20 million people, spread over roughly 1,500 square kilometers, has already closed all schools, stopped construction activities, and said it will impose restrictions on vehicle use to control pollution.
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Surgeons have performed the world’s first transplant of an entire human eye, an extraordinary addition to a face transplant — although it’s far too soon to know if the man will ever see through his new left eye. 

An accident with high-voltage power lines destroyed most of Aaron James’ face and one eye. His right eye still works. But surgeons at NYU Langone Health hoped replacing the missing one would yield better cosmetic results for his new face, because it would support the transplanted eye socket and lid. 

The NYU team announced Thursday that so far, it’s doing just that. James is recovering well from the dual transplant last May, and the donated eye looks remarkably healthy. 

“It feels good. I still don’t have any movement in it yet. My eyelid, I can’t blink yet. But I’m getting sensation now,” James told The Associated Press as doctors examined his progress recently. 

“You got to start somewhere, there’s got to be a first person somewhere,” said James, 46, of Hot Springs, Arkansas. “Maybe you’ll learn something from it that will help the next person.” 

Today, transplants of the cornea — the clear tissue in front of the eye — are common to treat certain types of vision loss. But transplanting the whole eye — the eyeball, its blood supply and the critical optic nerve that must connect it to the brain — is considered a moonshot in the quest to cure blindness. 

Whatever happens next, James’ surgery offers scientists an unprecedented window into how the human eye tries to heal. 

“We’re not claiming that we are going to restore sight,” said Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez, NYU’s plastic surgery chief, who led the transplant. “But there’s no doubt in my mind we are one step closer.” 

Some specialists had feared the eye would quickly shrivel like a raisin. Instead, when Rodriguez propped open James’ left eyelid last month, the donated hazel-colored eye was as plump and full of fluid as his own blue eye. Doctors see good blood flow and no sign of rejection. 

Now researchers have begun analyzing scans of James’ brain that detected some puzzling signals from that all-important but injured optic nerve. 

One scientist who has long studied how to make eye transplants a reality called the surgery exciting. 

“It’s an amazing validation” of animal experiments that have kept transplanted eyes alive, said Dr. Jeffrey Goldberg, chair of ophthalmology at Stanford University. 

The hurdle is how to regrow the optic nerve, although animal studies are making strides, Goldberg said. He praised the NYU team’s “audacity” in even aiming for optic nerve repair and said he hopes the transplant will spur more research. 

“We’re really on the precipice of being able to do this,” Goldberg said. 

James was working for a power line company in June 2021 when he was shocked by a live wire. He nearly died. Ultimately, he lost his left arm, requiring a prosthetic. His damaged left eye was so painful it had to be removed. Multiple reconstructive surgeries couldn’t repair extensive facial injuries including his missing nose and lips. 

James pushed through physical therapy until he was strong enough to escort his daughter Allie to a high school homecoming ceremony, wearing a face mask and eye patch. Still, he required breathing and feeding tubes, and he longed to smell, taste and eat solid food again. 

“In his mind and his heart, it’s him — so I didn’t care that, you know, he didn’t have a nose. But I did care that it bothered him,” said his wife, Meagan James. 

Face transplants remain rare and risky. James’ is only the 19th in the United States, the fifth Rodriguez has performed. The eye experiment added even more complexity. But James figured he’d be no worse off if the donated eye failed. 

Three months after James was placed on the national transplant waiting list, a matching donor was found. Kidneys, a liver and pancreas from the donor, a man in his 30s, saved three other people. 

During James’ 21-hour operation, surgeons added another experimental twist: When they spliced together the donated optic nerve to what remained of James’ original, they injected special stem cells from the donor in hopes of spurring its repair. 

Last month, tingles heralded healing facial nerves. James can’t yet open the eyelid and wears a patch to protect it. But as Rodriguez pushed on the closed eye, James felt a sensation — although on his nose rather than his eyelid, presumably until slow-growing nerves get reoriented. The surgeon also detected subtle movements beginning in muscles around the eye. 

Then came a closer look. NYU ophthalmologist Dr. Vaidehi Dedania ran a battery of tests. She found expected damage in the light-sensing retina in the back of the eye. But she said it appears to have enough special cells called photoreceptors to do the job of converting light to electrical signals, one step in creating vision. 

Normally, the optic nerve then would send those signals to the brain to be interpreted. James’ optic nerve clearly hasn’t healed. Yet when light was flashed into the donated eye during an MRI, the scan recorded some sort of brain signaling. 

That both excited and baffled researchers, although it wasn’t the right type for vision and may simply be a fluke, cautioned Dr. Steven Galetta, NYU’s neurology chair. Only time and more study may tell. 

As for James, “we’re just taking it one day at a time,” he said. 
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Recent heavy rain and flooding killed 15 people in Kenya and displaced thousands of others, the Kenya Red Cross Society says.

The heavy rainfall also killed livestock and destroyed businesses and farmland, said Peter Murgor, a disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation manager with the Kenya Red Cross Society.

“Schools [are] being affected … and even hospital facilities in some of the places that have been marooned are also affected,” Murgor told VOA.

The situation could get worse, Murgor said.

In its forecast for this year’s last quarter, the Kenya Meteorological Department had warned the country will experience above-average rainfall, driven by warmer sea surface temperatures over the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean.

“We are informed by the [weather forecaster] that November normally is the peak,” Murgor told VOA. “If November is the peak and we are just at the beginning of November, chances are … the situation is likely to worsen in the month towards the end, probably seeing a bit more people being displaced, probably seeing a bit more loss of livelihoods.”

Nearly half of the 47 counties in Kenya are at risk, he said, with the northeastern part of the country being the most affected.

Heavy rains also have affected neighboring Uganda, Ethiopia and Somalia, where the government declared a state of emergency after 29 people died and hundreds of thousands were displaced as a result of the extreme weather.

Meanwhile, in Kenya, Murgor said flash floods would likely cause more problems.

“We are likely to see a rise in disease outbreak as a secondary impact of the flooding,” he said. “But from the Kenya Red Cross prospect, we are working together with the ministry of health, with the government, with stakeholders, trying to see how to mitigate against the effect, how to anticipate and then try to act early [and] work with farmers to do post-harvest loss management.”

He also said that in cases in which early warnings are possible, communities would be alerted about possible floods so people can move to safer ground. 
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Crying in a hospital bed with a nebulizer mask on his tiny face, 1-month-old Ayansh Tiwari has a thick, hacking cough. His doctors blame the acrid air that blights New Delhi every year.

The spartan emergency room of the government-run Chacha Nehru Bal Chikitsalaya hospital in the Indian capital is crowded with children struggling to breathe — many with asthma and pneumonia, which spike as air pollution peaks each winter in the megacity of 30 million people.

Delhi regularly ranks among the most polluted major cities on the planet, with a melange of factory and vehicle emissions exacerbated by seasonal agricultural fires.

“Wherever you see there is poisonous smog,” said Ayansh’s mother Julie Tiwari, 26, as she rocked the baby on her lap, attempting to calm him.

“I try to keep the doors and windows closed as much as possible. But it’s like breathing poison all the time. I feel so helpless,” she told AFP, fighting back tears.

On Thursday, the level of PM2.5 particles — the smallest and most harmful, which can enter the bloodstream — topped 390 micrograms per cubic meter, according to monitoring firm IQAir, more than 25 times the daily maximum recommended by the World Health Organization.

Government efforts have so far failed to solve the country’s air quality problem, and a study in the Lancet medical journal attributed 1.67 million premature deaths to air pollution in the world’s most populous country in 2019.

‘Maddening rush’

“It’s a maddening rush in our emergency room during this time,” said Dhulika Dhingra, a pediatric pulmonologist at the hospital, which serves poor neighborhoods in one of Delhi’s most polluted areas.

The foul air severely impacts children, with devastating effects on their health and development.

Scientific evidence shows children who breathe polluted air are at higher risk of developing acute respiratory infections, a UNICEF report said last year.

A study published in the Lung India journal in 2021 found nearly one out of every three schoolchildren in Delhi had asthma and airflow obstruction.

Children are more vulnerable to air pollution than adults because they breathe more quickly and their brains, lungs and other organs are not fully developed.

“They can’t sit in one place, they keep running and with that, the respiratory rate increases even more. That is why they are more prone to the effects of pollution,” said Dhingra.

“This season is very difficult for them because they can hardly breathe.”

Vegetable vendor Imtiaz Qureshi’s 11-month-old son, Mohammad Arsalan, was admitted to the hospital overnight with breathing issues.

“We have to live day in and day out in this air,” said the distraught 40-year-old, who pulls his cart through the streets every day.

“If I go out, the air will kill me. If I don’t, poverty will kill me.”

‘Toxic environment’

The hospital provides treatment and medicine free of cost — none of its patients can afford private health care, and many cannot buy even a single air purifier for their one-room homes in the city’s sprawling slums.

Pediatrician Seema Kapoor, the hospital’s director, said patient inflows had risen steadily since the weather cooled, trapping pollutants closer to the ground.

“About 30-40% of the total attendance is primarily because of respiratory illnesses,” she said.

Pulmonologist Dhingra said the only advice they can offer parents is to restrict their children’s outdoor activities as much as possible.

“Imagine telling a parent not to let the child go out and play in this toxic environment.”

The Delhi government has announced emergency school closures, stopped construction and banned diesel vehicles from entering the city in a bid to bring down pollution levels.

But stubble burning by farmers in the neighboring agrarian states, which contributes significantly to Delhi’s pollution, continues unabated, drawing a rebuke from the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Delhi’s choked air is resulting in the “complete murder of our young people,” said the court.

Housewife Arshi Wasim, 28, brought her 18-month-old younger daughter Nida Wasim to the hospital with pneumonia.

“She coughs non-stop,” she said. “She doesn’t take milk or even water because her lungs are choked. Sometimes we have to give her oxygen and rush her to the doctor two or three times a day.

“Every year it’s the same story.”
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