What colour is your city? Healthy blue or smoggy grey? Air pollution is the cause of one-quarter to one-third of the major non-communicable disease killers – stroke, heart attack, respiratory disease and lungs, and a leading killer worldwide. This year’s World Health Assembly is featuring an interactive “BreatheLife” exhibit on urban air quality and health, which has been traveling around the world over the past two years.
The exhibit features a 3D street graphic from the famous street artist Kurt Wenner, illustrating scenes from clean and polluted cities, “solutions” mobiles and windmills and a virtual “bike tour” of cities around the world, which you can experience while pedalling a stationary bike. The traveling exhibit is part of the WHO and UN Environment-led BreatheLife campaign encouraging cities and countries to commit to achieving WHO Air Quality guidelines. Some two dozen cities have already joined the BreatheLife campaign including major cities in Mexico (Guadalajara in Jalisco State), Chile (Santiago) and most recently, Manchester, United Kingdom.