According to the latest European air quality data, more than 90 percent of Europeans breathe air that doesn't meet World Health Organization standards. The northeastern Italian town of Cellino San Marco-Mesagne sits at the top of the blacklist, with 117 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic meter. Torchiarolo follows at 113. The EU limit is 25. The WHO limit is 5.

Macedonia? In the red. Among the nine countries exceeding the EU threshold. Worst in the industrial zones.

The mortality numbers speak for themselves. Italy - 101 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants from long-term PM2.5 exposure. Spain - 41. France - 34. Germany - 37. Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and Macedonia cluster together in the same „crossing" right behind Italy.

That means one thing: the Balkans, together with southern Italy, are „Europe's lung crisis". The countries with the highest pollution-related death rates are precisely the ones that talk about it the least in their political discourse.

What creates this lethal soup? Burning biomass (wood-fired heating), vehicle exhausts, refineries, cement plants, and the burning of fossil fuels. Winter works against us - low temperature inversion traps the particles above the cities.

Skopje is in the world's top 5 most polluted cities every winter - from December through March. Bitola, Tetovo and Kičevo follow. But the problem isn't „a winter problem". It's year-round. It just lives below the radar in the warmer half of the year.

Why is the mortality so high in Italy, yet there's still no political reaction? The same question applies to us. Polluted air kills quietly - not in one night like a fire, not on the street like a car crash. It kills with ten years of lung cancer, fifteen years of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, twenty years of heart trouble.

That doesn't look like a crisis. That looks like „old age". And that's why politicians don't react - because no one can claim their grandfather died „from the air".

And yet the data says he did. Along with 100 others out of every 100,000.

In the middle of Europe, the Balkans are in the red. Italy leads the statistics. And us? Every winter we wait for „nature" itself to clear the problem - a southern wind, or snow. As if we weren't a country with a budget for environmental protection.

The question is simple. How many deaths have to pile up in cities from Skopje to Bitola before someone admits that polluted air isn't „a winter issue" - but a constant, continuous, unresolved problem belonging to everyone who collects a salary to „solve" it?