OBJECTIVES Air pollution contributes to mortality and morbidity. We estimated the impact of outdoor air pollution on public health in Seoul metropolitan area, Korea. Attributable cases of morbidity and mortality were estimated. METHODS Epidemiology-based exposure-response functions for a 10 μg/m3 increase in particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10) were used to quantify the effects of air pollutio...

BACKGROUND Prenatal exposures to stress and physical toxins influence children's respiratory health, although few studies consider these factors together. OBJECTIVES We sought to concurrently examine the effects of prenatal community-level psychosocial (exposure to community violence [ECV]) and physical (air pollution) stressors on repeated wheeze in 708 urban children followed to age 2 years...

Numerous observational studies have assessed the association between ambient air pollution and chronic disease incidence, but there is no uniform approach to create an exposure metric that captures the variability in air pollution through time and determines the most relevant exposure window. The purpose of the present study was to assess ways of modeling exposure to air pollution in relation t...

Estimation of the long-term health effects of air pollution is a challenging task, especially when modeling spatial small-area disease incidence data in an ecological study design. The challenge comes from the unobserved underlying spatial autocorrelation structure in these data, which is accounted for using random effects modeled by a globally smooth conditional autoregressive model. These smo...

Land-use regression (LUR) models are increasingly used to estimate air pollution exposure in epidemiologic studies. These models use air pollution measurements taken at a small set of locations and modeling based on geographical covariates for which data are available at all study participant locations. The process of LUR model development commonly includes a variable selection procedure. When ...

The U.S. health care sector is highly interconnected with industrial activities that emit much of the nation's pollution to air, water, and soils. We estimate emissions directly and indirectly attributable to the health care sector, and potential harmful effects on public health. Negative environmental and public health outcomes were estimated through economic input-output life cycle assessment...

Particulate pollution has important consequences for human health, and is an issue of global concern. Outdoor air pollution has become a cause for alarm in India in particular because recent data suggest that ambient pollution levels in Indian cities are some of the highest in the world. We study the number of particles between 0.5μm and 2.5μm indoors while using affordable air purifiers in the...

This paper examines conditions under which domestic political institutions mediate the effect of trade competition on regulatory races in the environmental area. We focus on the role of domestic veto players in shaping governments' policy responses to trade competition which are reflected eventually in air (Sulphur dioxide, SO2) and water pollution (Biochemical Oxygen Demand, BOD) intensity lev...

Receptor models apportion an ambient mixture of pollutants to the contributing pollution sources. Often, neither the number of sources nor their chemical profiles are known precisely. The dual goals of modeling are to estimate the chemical “signature” of the sources, and to characterize the mixing process. I develop a novel modeling approach for receptor data where all model components are comp...

We evaluate the impact of climate change on U.S. air quality and health in 2050 and 2100 using a global modeling framework and integrated economic, climate, and air pollution projections. Three internally consistent socioeconomic scenarios are used to value health benefits of greenhouse gas mitigation policies specifically derived from slowing climate change. Our projections suggest that climat...