The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has announced that there is now no country in the world that uses leaded petrol for cars and lorries.

The toxic fuel which has contaminated air, soil and water for almost a century can cause heart disease, cancer and stroke, and has also been linked to problems with brain development in children.

Many of the high-income countries had banned the fuel by the 1980s, but it was only in July that Algeria ran out of the leaded petrol.

António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General, referred to the annihilation of leaded petrol as an "international success story".

He said, "Ending the use of leaded petrol will prevent more than one million premature deaths each year from heart disease, strokes and cancer, and it will protect children whose IQs are damaged by exposure to lead."

In the early 1920s, people started adding lead to petrol in order to improve engine performance.

An alarm was raised as early as 1924 when five workers were declared dead and dozens more hospitalised after suffering convulsions at a refinery run by the US oil giant, Standard Oil.

But in spite of this, lead continued to be added to all petrol globally until the 1970s when wealthier countries started phasing out its use.

However, three decades later, in the early 2000s, there were still 86 nations using leaded petrol.

North Korea, Myanmar and Afghanistan stopped selling leaded petrol by 2016, leaving only a handful of countries, which includes Iraq, Yemen and Algeria, still providing the toxic fuel in the latter half of the last decade.

The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) body has worked with governments, private companies and civic groups to end the use of leaded petrol since 2002.

The Executive Director of UNEP, Inger Andersen said, "Leaded fuel illustrates in a nutshell the kind of mistakes humanity has been making at every level of our societies."

Notwithstanding, she added that eradicating the fuel shows that "humanity can learn from and fix mistakes that we've made".

Environmentalist campaign body Greenpeace hailed what it called "the end of one toxic era".

Climate Campaigner at Greenpeace Africa, Thandile Chinyavanhu said, "It clearly shows that if we can phase out one of the most dangerous polluting fuels in the 20th century, we can absolutely phase out all fossil fuels."