4460 Dead From Air Pollution--Iranian Health Ministry

[indian_foxhound]

The BBC reported on Saturday that Mr. Hasan
Aghajani, advisor to the health minister, had
told an Iranian TV station that 4460 Iranians
had died as a result of air pollution in the past
year (1). He also reported a 10% increase in emergency
service calls, and a 30% increase in visits to
the cardiology centers in Tehran. Last Wednesday, schools and government
buildings were shut down to avoid exposing
the public to toxic levels of air pollution and to
reduce traffic in many iranian cities, including:
Tehran, Isfahan, and Ghom. Tehran was shut
down again this past saturday under similar circumstances. More than 22 million Iranians live in polluted
cities and are subject to increased health risks
resulting from air pollution (1). Last year the Iranian government decided to
use petrochemical plants to produce petrol to
overcome the lack of sufficient refining
capacity to meet the national need for
gasoline. As this pollution crises intensifies
there is no sign that the Government is willing to concede that the new synthetic petrol is to
blame for the pollution, and move to limit its
use in large population centers. As far as the
regime is concerned, the new petrol is safe, if
not safer than what Iran used to import. Like many Islamic republic lies, the lie about
the safety of petrol is covered by layers and
layers of lies that it is now near impossible for
the government to admit mistakes and take
corrective action. There is one admission
buried in ISNA 2011 archives that the iranian petrol is made to Euro 2 quality, and not
current standards (5). Good luck finding any
recent honest discussion by Iranian officials
on the subject. The other question that this issue raises is
whether or not the Iranian government knew
of the health risks to the population when it
decided to more ahead with a hasty plan to
replace imported gasoline with its own
synthetic (instead of refined) petrol. It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine that they
knew the risks to the general population but
chose to make this particular "human"
sacrifice to keep their political and nuclear
ambitions alive. Khomeini faced a similar choice years ago
when he had to choose between ending the
Iran-Iraq war, or keep sending thousands of
Iranian youths in futile "human wave" attacks
to achieve the unattainable goal of punishing
Sadam for attacking Iran . Khamenei, like Khomeini before him, is
pursuing unattainable goals of his own
(nuclear and military) at the cost of physical
and financial suffering of the Iranian people.
The Kayhan editor recently wrote that "some"
want the leader, Khamenei, to drink the «ﻡﺎﺟ ﺮﻫﺯ» "poison" on the nuclear issue (2),
referring to Khomeini's decision to end the
war with Sadam in 1988, which he compared
to drinking poison (3,4). In both cases the question is not when the
supreme leader is forced to drink the poison,
but rather how long the "leader" is willing to
tolerate the suffering of his people, or in this
case, their slow poisoning by air pollution,
before he relents and gives up on failed policies. If history continues to repeat itself in Iran then
we are bound to see Khamenei pushing the
country to the edge of total disaster before he
decides to drink his «ﺮﻫﺯ ﻡﺎﺟ». (1)?BBC ??????? - ????? ?????
iran/2013/01/130105_l39_tehran_pollution_
casualty.shtml
(2)ANF - Farsi | Ajansa Neyan a Firat
rupel=nuce&nuceID=9209
(3)http://www.farsnews.com/newstext.php? nn=8604170080 (Farsi)
(4)http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/21/us/
khomeini-accepts-poison-of-ending-the-war-
with-iraq-un-sending-mission.html (English)
(5)http://isna.ir/en/news/9008-11518/Iran-
to-produce-gasoline-under-Euro-4-standards