Death resulting from air pollution now stands at a shocking seven million all over the world as of year 2012, according to a report by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Based on the same report, nearly half a million Chinese citizens experience premature deaths every year caused by air pollution.  This translates into a huge economic burden.

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The report cites that China is losing an annual $300 billion (1.87 trillion Yuan) from illnesses and eventual death caused by air pollution. The Beijing government sees the matter as a political issue and has "declared war" on it, according to Premier Li Keqiang.

Globally, one death out of eight in 2012 was linked to pollution from sources ranging from fumes from cooking indoors to toxic air from fossil burning by motor vehicles.

As a consequence of severely poor air quality are pulmonary diseases, stroke, and lung cancer are the leading killers, while the long-term consequences passed on to infants and young children are physical defects and impaired cognitive functions.

Air pollution is classified into two types; outdoor air pollution resulting from the range of coal burning to diesel engines now kills 3.7 million people.  Furthermore indoor air pollution caused from using coal for cooking, dung and wood stoves in enclosed spaces now kills 4.3 million people.

"Air pollution, and we're talking about both indoors and outdoors, is now the biggest environmental health problem, and it's affecting everyone, both developed and developing countries," said the WHO's chief for public and environmental health, Maria Neira,.

People all over can be exposed to both types of air pollution, and as result, overlapping figures cannot sum up the two, thus brings the figure of seven million attributed deaths.

The worst affected region in the world is Southeast Asia, that includes India to Indonesia, and the Western Pacific from China down to the Philippines.

This region alone accounts for 3.3 million deaths from indoor pollution, and another 2.6 million from the outdoor form with a total of 5.1 million, after taking into consideration an overlap.

In the African continent, the total death toll stands at 680,000, 400,000 deaths in the Middle East, 131,000 in the Latin American region and 287,000 from the lowest to middle economy European countries.

Wealthy nations are not spared, with nearly 96,000 deaths in North America, 295,000 deaths in the high-income European countries and 68,000 in the Pacific area that includes Australia and Japan.

The last time the WHO conducted a survey on the impact of global air pollution was in 2008 with only 1.3 million deaths blamed on outdoor air pollution and only 1.9 million from indoor air pollution. The figures were low at that time because the survey focused only on urban centers and did not consider the overlapping effects of both indoor and outdoor on individual cases.

Using satellite imagery technology, assessing the impact of air pollution in rural areas has become easier, which results to newer information on the health impact and a much better overall accounting of affected residents.

Neira stressed that the new figures are "shocking and worrying." She adds that, "The risks from air pollution are now far greater than previously thought or understood, particularly for heart disease and strokes."

The exposure to indoor air pollution alone now stands at 2.9 billion, in mostly poor nations living in enclosed homes where open fire is the primary method of heating and cooking, thereby exposing them to soot-filled air.

Kirk Smith, an environmental health expert from the University of California at Berkeley, said women and girls in India are at high risk and likened their living conditions to having a kitchen "burning 400 cigarettes an hour."

Neri stressed that, "Few risks have a greater impact on global health today than air pollution. The evidence signals the need for concerted action to clean up the air we all breathe."

The WHO officials call for nations to re-evaluate policies, by citing the impact in the developed world that took a shift toward cleaner power sources, efficient management of energy demand, and technical innovations by the automotive industry.

The use of low technology measures in developing nations can greatly reduce the impact of air pollution such as the shift to "clean cooking stoves" and improving indoor ventilation. Similarly, a radical shakeup is still needed in the transport policies.

The WHO cited the recent move in Paris, France to impose restrictions on car use and the scrapping of public transportation tariffs as a wise move but longer implementation maybe needed in the near future if the rise in air pollution levels is not seriously addressed by all nations.

The WHO's public and environmental health coordinator, Carlos Dora said that, "The air is a shared resource. In order to breathe clean air, we have to have interventions in the areas that pollute air."