Ximena Aguilera, director of the Health Observatory at Diego Portales University, published a letter to the editor in the newspaper El Mercurio, co-signed with Maisa Rojas, an academic at the University of Chile and former Minister of the Environment. In the letter, both called for the resumption of the processing of Supreme Decree No. 3 of 2026 from the Ministry of the Environment, which aims to update national standards for fine particulate matter (PM2.5).
In the letter, titled “Resuming the Decree Withdrawn in March,” the authors warned that, despite the progress made by Chile in reducing emissions and decontamination, air pollution continues to be one of the country’s main environmental and public health problems.
The text highlighted that, according to IQAir’s 2025 World Air Quality Report, Santiago registers an average annual PM2.5 concentration of 18.9 μg/m³, almost four times higher than the guideline recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), and that during critical winter episodes, this figure can increase up to thirteenfold in a single day.
Furthermore, the academics emphasized that PM2.5 is the pollutant with the greatest health impact due to its ability to penetrate deep into the respiratory system and reach the bloodstream, being associated with chronic respiratory diseases, cardiovascular diseases, lung cancer, and cognitive impairment. They also noted that in Chile, this pollutant causes more than 4,000 premature deaths each year.
Read the letter at the following link.
