Cleaner air would save two million lives a year - study

WASHINGTON: Cleaner air worldwide would save two million lives a year and not only in the most polluted countries, a study found.

"We were surprised to find the importance of cleaning air not just in the dirtiest parts of the world -- which we expected to find -- but also in cleaner environments like the US, Canada and Europe," co-author Julian Marshall of the University of Minnesota said in the study published by Environmental Science & Technology, on Tuesday.