Key points from article :
New charity ALUK found - 500,000 people died from pneumonia, asthma and other respiratory conditions over a 7-year period.
Hospitalized people for lung conditions in England and Wales has doubled in the last 20 years.
A study published in BMC found that admission rates (per 100,000) increased from 1535 in 1999 to 3143 in 2019.
Common causes were influenza/pneumonia, chronic lower respiratory disease, or acute lower respiratory infections.
One likely cause was air pollution, accounting for 36,000 premature deaths per year in the UK.
Around 7,000 of the deaths are in Scotland.
People in the poorest neighbourhoods seven times more likely to die of a lung condition.
Eurostat found there were 84,721 respiratory deaths recorded in the UK in 2018.
Only Turkey had higher per capita death rate than the UK, with people in Finland 3 times less likely to die from lung disease.
In 2019, NHS said it would target improved treatment and support...so that health outcomes would be "equal or better".
