For one country, China, the impacts are a bit startling. Asthma ratings up 40 percent over the last 20 years, prevalence up to 11% in some cities and 1.6 million related deaths annually (1 in every 1000 people). What is even more startling is no one even knew how bad the pollution was until 2008 when the US Embassy in Beijing installed a rooftop air-quality monitor that would tweet out data every hour.