The joint appeal by air pollution scientists and respiratory doctors, attending major conferences in Paris and Munich, coincided with a European Parliament debate on the so-called CAFE directive on air quality.

CAFE focuses on tiny particles which are typically expelled by coal-burning power plants, factory chimneys, waste incinerators and vehicle exhausts and which can linger in the air for hours, sometimes days. They are also produced from natural sources, such as forest fires and volcanoes.

These particulates can lodge in the throat and lungs and are increasingly associated with asthma, bronchitis, emphysema and cardiac stress.

If approved in its present form, CAFE would require the EU 25 nations to set binding limits of 30 micrograms per cubic meter for particles that measure less than 10 microns across.

It also, for the first time in EU history, suggests -- but does not stipulate -- limits of 25 micrograms per cubic metre for fine particulate matter, whose particles measure 2.5 microns or less..

The experts' joint statement attacked the 10-micron proposals as badly weakening current regulations, criticising the pollution limits; the time given to governments to enforce those limits; and a loophole that meant "natural" sources of particulates could be taken into account.

"As negotiations now stand, this proposal would mark a serious reduction in public health protection," said Bert Brunekreef, a professor of environmental epidemiology and director of the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

"Thousands of premature deaths per year" could be the result, he said.

CAFE's provisions for 2.5-micron particulates were also savaged for allowing limits deemed to be too high and which in any case were not binding. The United States and Canada have already adopted curbs on this form of pollution.

"We fail to see why Europe's citizens should be denied levels of protection that have already been afforded to US residents for the last 10 years," said Ben Nemery, chair of public health at the University of Leuven, Belgium.

The Paris conference gathered leading experts in pollution and epidemiology; the Munich conference was the annual congress of the European Respiratory Society (ERS).

Meanwhile, a study presented in Paris Monday calculated the number of premature deaths that would occur in 26 European countries if 2.5-micron particulates were limited to CAFE's 25 micrograms per cubic metre or, as in the United States, to 15 micrograms per cubic metre.

Under 25 micrograms, 4,500 lives would be saved annually; under US-style limits, 13,300 lives would be saved.

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