NEW DELHI (AP) — Recent remarks about pollution from two Indian officials have increased frustration among residents who say policymakers are unwilling to acknowledge the severity of India's air quality crisis.
When Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav told Parliament earlier this month that India’s capital, New Delhi, has seen 200 days with good air quality readings, pollution experts and opposition leaders said he chose a figure that overlooked the worst pollution months.
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FILE - People walk through an overhead bridge amidst morning smog in New Delhi, India, Oct. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup, File)
FILE - A cyclist pedals through morning smog near the India Gate monument as he transports used home appliances in New Delhi, India, Oct. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup, File)
FILE - A person holds a sign during a protest against what they called the government's lack of action to combat air pollution in New Delhi, India, Nov. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup, File)
FILE - People walk through smog in New Delhi, India, Dec. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Piyush Nagpal, File)
A week later, Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta said the air quality index — a measure of air pollution — was similar to a temperature reading and could be dealt with by spraying water. Crowds jeered her at a subsequent public event, shouting “AQI” in reference to the city's poor air quality readings.
Gupta had also greenlit a controversial cloud seeding program earlier this year, saying it could produce rain that would lower pollution — despite lack of evidence that the approach would work.
Residents in New Delhi and surrounding areas engulfed in toxic smog over the last few months said these are just the latest examples of officials denying the severity of air quality problems.
“Instead of doing cloud seeding, I hope the government will wake up and take some real action,” said Anita, a 73-year-old New Delhi resident who goes by only one name. “It’s a shame."
Environmentalists and data experts said India’s air quality measurement standards are looser than in countries such as the United States, so moderate readings often mask dangerous pollution levels. India's government air quality standards are also less stringent than World Health Organization guidelines.
Experts said these gaps can erode public trust, even as few residents fully grasp how harmful polluted air is.
India’s air quality is measured through a nationwide network of monitors and sensors, as well as satellite data.
The monitors collect robust data, but there are too few of them, said Ronak Sutaria, CEO of Respirer Living, which builds machines and software for air quality monitoring. He said that the system falls short of letting citizens know how polluted the air in their neighborhoods really is.
In 2019, India launched the National Clean Air Program, which set targets aiming to reduce pollution by up to 40% in 131 cities by 2026.
The program has seen relative success, providing millions of dollars for monitors and water-spraying machines to reduce dust generated from vehicles plying the roads, construction activity and winds that blow desert sand into the cities.
However, air pollution experts said the program has done little to reduce pollution from carbon-spewing industries or vehicle emissions, which are among the biggest sources of dirty air. Other sources include the burning of crop stubble on farms, use of wood and cow dung as cooking fuel and burning of garbage.
A 2024 report by the Centre for Science and Environment, a New Delhi-based think tank, found that 64% of funds under the program went toward reducing dust and only 12% to reducing pollution from vehicles and less than 1% to bringing down industrial air pollution.
“We are making huge investments in air quality monitoring. And so when we are expanding, then it also becomes an imperative that we should be focusing on the quality,” said Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director at the think tank.
A study last year by the medical journal Lancet linked long-term exposure to polluted air to 1.5 million additional deaths every year in India, compared to a scenario where the country would have met WHO standards.
Yet earlier this month, Prataprao Jadhav, India’s junior health minister, said there is no conclusive data available in the country to establish a direct correlation of death or disease exclusively to air pollution.
Shweta Narayan, a campaign lead at the Global Climate and Health Alliance, said that air pollution is still not taken seriously as a public health issue.
“Deaths related to air pollution are not being counted. And the reason why it’s not being counted is because there are no systematic mechanisms to do so,” Narayan said.
Narayan said pollution causes long-term health problems for everyone exposed, but that it's especially bad for pregnant women, the elderly and children.
“As a consequence of exposure to air pollution, we see a lot of preterm births, miscarriages, low birth weight. Exposure at this stage has a lifelong consequence,” she said.
Earlier this month, New Delhi residents took to the streets to protest against dirty air and demand immediate government action in a relatively rare instance of public demonstrations.
“We do not know whether ... citizens will be able to link air pollution to elections, but perhaps that’s where India is moving toward,” environmentalist Vimlendu Jha said in an interview. “Citizens are fed up.”
Jha said authorities are not being honest about the problem and that there is a lack of political will to address the issue.
“There’s more headline and image management than pollution management,” he said, adding that the high levels of pollution have been treated as normal by political leaders.
“The first thing that the government needs to do is to be honest about the problem that we have," he said. "The right diagnosis is extremely critical.”
Regardless of whether policymakers act, the consequences of dirty air for the residents of India’s capital are evident.
“Everyone feels the pollution. People are not able to work or even breathe,” said Satish Sharma, a 60-year-old auto rickshaw driver.
Sharma said he has reduced his work hours as his health has deteriorated in the last few weeks because of the pollution.
“I want to tell the government to please do something about this pollution," he said. "Otherwise, people will move away from here.”
Follow Sibi Arasu on X at @sibi123.
Arasu reported from Bengaluru, India. AP journalists Piyush Nagpal in New Delhi and Aniruddha Ghosal in Hanoi, Vietnam, contributed to this report.
The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
FILE - People walk through an overhead bridge amidst morning smog in New Delhi, India, Oct. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup, File)
FILE - A cyclist pedals through morning smog near the India Gate monument as he transports used home appliances in New Delhi, India, Oct. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup, File)
FILE - A person holds a sign during a protest against what they called the government's lack of action to combat air pollution in New Delhi, India, Nov. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup, File)
FILE - People walk through smog in New Delhi, India, Dec. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Piyush Nagpal, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — No quick dispatching of disease investigators. No televised news conference to inform the public. No timely health alerts to doctors.
In the midst of a hantavirus outbreak that involves Americans and is making headlines around the world, the U.S. government's top public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been uncharacteristically missing in action, according to a number of experts.
To President Donald Trump, "We seem to have things under very good control," as he told reporters Friday evening.
To experts, the situation aboard a cruise ship has not spiraled because, unlike COVID-19 or measles or the flu, hantavirus does not spread easily. It has been health experts in other countries, not the United States, who have been dealing primarily with the outbreak in the past week.
“The CDC is not even a player," said Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University. “I've never seen that before.”
Not until late Friday did CDC actions accelerate.
Health officials confirmed the deployment of a team to Spain's Canary Islands, where the ship was expected to arrive early Sunday local time, to meet the Americans onboard. They said a second team will go to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska as part of a plan to evacuate American passengers from the ship to a quarantine center. Also, the CDC issued its first health alert to U.S. doctors, advising them of the possibility of imported cases.
The CDC's diminished role in this outbreak is an indicator the agency is no longer the force in international health or the protector of domestic health that it once was, some experts said.
The hantavirus outbreak is “a sentinel event” that speaks to “how well the country is prepared for a disease threat. And right now, I’m very sorry to say that we are not prepared,” said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, chief executive officer of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
Early last month, a 70-year-old Dutch man developed a feverish illness on a cruise ship traveling from Argentina to Antarctica and some islands in the South Atlantic. He died less than a week later. More people became sick, including the man's wife and a German woman, who both died.
Hantavirus was first identified as a cause of sickness of one of the cases on May 2. The World Health Organization swung into action and by Monday was calling it an outbreak. About two dozen Americans were on the ship, including about seven who disembarked last month and 17 who remained on board.
For decades, the CDC partnered with the WHO in such situations. The CDC acted as a mainstay of any international investigation, providing staff and expertise to help unravel any outbreak mystery, develop ways to control it and communicate to the public what they should know and how they should worry.
Such actions were a large reason why the CDC developed a reputation as the world's premier public health agency.
But this time, the WHO has been center stage. It made the risk assessment that has told people the outbreak is not a pandemic threat.
“I don’t think this is a giant threat to the United States,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center. But how this situation has played out “just shows how empty and vapid the CDC is right now,” she said.
The current situation comes after 16 tumultuous months during which the Trump administration withdrew from the WHO, has restricted CDC scientists from talking to international counterparts at times and embarked on a plan to build its own international public health network through one-on-one agreements with individual countries.
The administration has laid off thousands of CDC scientists and public health professionals, including members of the agency's ship sanitation program.
As this was playing out, Trump's health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said he was working to “restore the CDC’s focus on infectious disease, invest in innovation, and rebuild trust through integrity and transparency.”
The CDC has not been completely silent on hantavirus.
The agency on Wednesday issued a short statement that said the risk to the American public is “extremely low,” and described the U.S. government as “the world’s leader in global health security.”
Said Nuzzo: “Not only was that not helpful, it actually does damage because a core principle of public health communications is humility.”
The CDC's acting director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, posted a message on social media that the agency was lending its expertise in coordinating with other federal agencies and international authorities. Arizona officials this week said they learned from the CDC that one of the Americans who left the ship — a person with no symptoms and not considered contagious — had already returned to the state. WHO officials said the CDC has been sharing technical information.
The CDC also is “monitoring the health status and preparing medical support for all of the American passengers on the cruise,” Bhattacharya wrote.
But federal health officials have mostly been tight-lipped, declining interview requests.
In interviews this week, some experts made a comparison with a 2020 incident involving the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship docked in Japan that became the setting of one of the first large COVID-19 outbreaks outside of China.
The CDC sent personnel to the port, helped evacuate American passengers, ran quarantines, shared genetic data on the virus, coordinated with the WHO and Japan, held public briefings and rapidly published reports “that became the world’s reference data on cruise ship COVID transmission,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, a former CDC director.
Some aspects of the international response to the Diamond Princess were criticized, and it did not halt the outbreak or stop COVID-19’s spread across the world. But some experts say it was not for the CDC's lack of trying.
“The CDC was right on top of it, very visible, very active in trying to manage and contain it,” Gostin said, while the agency's work now is delayed and subdued.
Instead of working with nearly all of the world's nations through the WHO, the Trump administration has pursued bilateral health agreements with individual nations for information sharing, public health support, and what it describes as “the introduction of innovative American technologies.” Roughly 30 agreements are currently in place.
That's not sufficient, Gostin said. “You can't possibly cover a global health crisis by doing one-on-one deals with countries here and there,” he said.
Associated Press writers Ali Swenson in New York, Darlene Superville in Washington and Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed to this report.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Passengers on the the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship, MV Hondius, watch epidemiologists board the boat in Praia, during their voyage to Spain's port of Tenerife, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo)
Workers set up temporary shelters in the area where passengers from the MV Hondius cruise ship are expected to arrive at the port of Granadilla in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)
Crew members of the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship, MV Hondius, wait their turns for a first interview with epidemiologists, during the voyage to Spain's port of Tenerife, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo)
Health workers in protective gear evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship into an ambulance at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
A Spanish Civil Guard officer inspects the area where passengers from the MV Hondius cruise ship are expected to arrive at the port of Granadilla in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)
