section_path: Damage to human health
section_name: Damage to human health
paragraph_text: Damage to human health
  
  The use of coal as fuel causes health problems and deaths. The mining and processing of coal causes air and water pollution. Coal-powered plants emit nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, particulate pollution, and heavy metals, which adversely affect human health. Coal bed methane extraction is important to avoid mining accidents.
  
  The deadly London smog was caused primarily by the heavy use of coal. Globally coal is estimated to cause 800,000 premature deaths every year, mostly in India and China.
  
  Burning coal is a major contributor to sulfur dioxide emissions, which creates PM2.5 particulates, the most dangerous form of air pollution.
  
  Coal smokestack emissions cause asthma, strokes, reduced intelligence, artery blockages, heart attacks, congestive heart failure, cardiac arrhythmias, mercury poisoning, arterial occlusion, and lung cancer.
  
  Annual health costs in Europe from use of coal to generate electricity are estimated at up to €43 billion.
  
  In China, improvements to air quality and human health would increase with more stringent climate policies, mainly because the country's energy is so heavily reliant on coal. And there would be a net economic benefit.
  
  A 2017 study in the Economic Journal found that for Britain during the period 1851–1860, "a one standard deviation increase in coal use raised infant mortality by 6–8% and that industrial coal use explains roughly one-third of the urban mortality penalty observed during this period."
  
  Breathing in coal dust causes coalworker's pneumoconiosis or "black lung", so called because the coal dust literally turns the lungs black. In the US alone, it is estimated that 1,500 former employees of the coal industry die every year from the effects of breathing in coal mine dust.
  
  Huge amounts of coal ash and other waste is produced annually. Use of coal generates hundreds of millions of tons of ash and other waste products every year. These include fly ash, bottom ash, and flue-gas desulfurization sludge, that contain mercury, uranium, thorium, arsenic, and other heavy metals, along with non-metals such as selenium.
  
  Around 10% of coal is ash. Coal ash is hazardous and toxic to human beings and some other living things. Coal ash contains the radioactive elements uranium and thorium. Coal ash and other solid combustion byproducts are stored locally and escape in various ways that expose those living near coal plants to radiation and environmental toxics.