Urban air pollution is an important environmental factor that is effecting a large portion of urban dwellers in developing economies. Due to the limitations of dose and impact nature, direct measurement of negative implications of urban air pollution is difficult and WHO has developed indirect methods such as Environmental Burden of Disease. However, in this study to measure the economic costs ...

Pollution: Associations Persist with Continued Advances in Research Methodology (See Neas et al., p. 629; Lee and Schwartz; p. 633; and Fairley, p. 637) In this issue of Environmental Health Perspectives there are papers by Fairley, Neas et al., and Lee and Schwartz. Although these papers present different approaches, they provide a reasonable representation of stateof-the-art epidemiologic res...

Air pollution is a major concern of new civilized world, which has a serious toxicological impact on human health and the environment. It has a number of different emission sources, but motor vehicles and industrial processes contribute the major part of air pollution. According to the World Health Organization, six major air pollutants include particle pollution, ground-level ozone, carbon mon...

Early concerns regarding the health-related effects of air pollution originated from severe episodes in Meuse Valley, Belgium, in 1930; Donora, Pennsylvania, in 1948; and London, in 1952. Although the overall effects of these episodes continue to be debated, well-documented, episode-related increases in morbidity and mortality from cardiopulmonary causes provided dramatic evidence that extremel...

Air pollution is a major global environmental problem, with various adverse effects on health and the environment. This introductory article provides an overview of related global and regional legal instruments. The article evaluates the legal landscape in terms of its coverage, geographic scope and effectiveness, and concludes that the legal measures currently in place fall far short of provid...

Air pollution originating from road traffic is a known risk factor of respiratory and cardiovascular disease (both in terms of chronic and acute effects). While adverse effects on cardiovascular health have also been linked with noise (after controlling for air pollution), noise exposure has been commonly linked to sleep impairment and negative emotional reactions. Health is multi-faceted, both...

The aim of this study was to assess the respiratory effects of outdoor air pollution after correcting for allergy and indoor air quality. The respiratory health survey targeted 1,129 schoolchildren, 9 yrs of age, attending schools in Krakow located in city areas differing in outdoor air pollution levels. Chronic phlegm as a unique symptom was related neither to allergy nor to indoor variables, ...

Several cultures emphasize that one should live in harmony with the environment, avoiding those human activities that substantially interfere with natural processes, including air pollution. Undoubtedly, the atmosphere is a principal environmental component, representing a crucial part of the entire climate system (Ayers, 2005). It behaves as a colloidal medium because it contains not only gase...

While the health effects of air pollution have been an international public health concern since at least the 1950s, recent research has focused on two broad sources of air pollution, namely, biomass fuel (BMF) and motor vehicle exhaust (MVE). Many studies have shown associations between air pollution PM and exacerbations of pre-existing COPD, but the role of air pollution PM in the development...