This article suggests and discusses two novel aspects for the formulation of standards for environmental toxicants. First, uniform national standards for each pollutant will be underprotective for some ecosystems and overprotective for others, inasmuch as the toxicity of a pollutant to the indigenous biota is dependent on the physicochemical properties of the recipient environment. As the numbe...

Pollutants, brought into a swimming pool by bathers, will react with chlorine to form disinfection by-products (DBPs). Some of these DBPs are found to be respiratory and ocular irritant and might be associated with asthma, or might even be carcinogenic. As DBPs in swimming pools are formed from bather-shed-pollutants, a reduction of these pollutants will lead to a reduction of DBPs. Until now, ...

It is widely recognised that riparian zones can greatly reduce the movement of pollutants from hillslopes into streams. While several indices of stream condition exist, the spatial distribution of the pollutant and runoff trapping functions of the riparian zone remains poorly understood. This paper describes three indices, which quantify the spatial distribution of riparian zones that function ...

Prenatal chemical exposure has been frequently associated with reduced fetal growth by single pollutant regression models although inconsistent results have been obtained. Our study estimated the effects of exposure to single pollutants and mixtures on birth weight in 248 mother-child pairs. Arsenic, copper, lead, manganese and thallium were measured in cord blood, cadmium in maternal blood, me...

In this study, the effect of seasonal variation on air flow and pollutant dispersion characteristics was numerically investigated. A three-dimensional urban canopy model with unit aspect ratio (H/D = 1) was used to calculate surface temperature distribution in the street canyon. Four representative time events (1000 LST, 1300 LST, 1600 LST and 2000 LST) during typical clear summer and winter da...

The evaluation of the effects of air pollution on public health and human-wellbeing requires reliable data. Standard air quality monitoring stations provide accurate measurements of airborne pollutant levels, but, due to their sparse distribution, they cannot capture accurately the spatial variability of air pollutant concentrations within cities. Dedicated in-depth field campaigns have dense s...

Air pollution epidemiologic studies use ambient pollutant concentrations as surrogates of personal exposure. Strong correlations among numerous ambient pollutant concentrations, however, have made it difficult to determine the relative contribution of each pollutant to a given health outcome and have led to criticism that health effect estimates for particulate matter may be biased due to confo...

AIM To investigate the acute health effects of winter outdoor air pollution (nitrogen dioxide (NO(2)), ozone (O(3)), sulphur dioxide (SO(2)), sulphate (SO(4)(2-)),and particles (PM(10))) on schoolchildren in an area of southern England where levels of SO(2) had been reported to be high. METHODS A total of 179 children, aged 7-13, from three schools (two urban and one rural location), were inc...