Non-point source (NPS) pollution contributes greatly to the contamination of surface water quality and has aroused widespread concerns. NPS pollution is influenced by a multitude of site-related factors whose effects are complicated. We estimated NPS pollution with a soil and water assessment tool (SWAT) model in China’s Fan River watershed. A new method, boosted regression tree (BRT), was prop...

Seven million premature deaths in the year 2012 could be attributable to air pollution, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) in its last Burden of Disease report [1]. Around 4.3 out of 7 million were caused by ambient air pollution and 3.7 million by household air pollution. In recent years, evidence regarding air pollution effects on the child respiratory system are growing conside...

Air pollution is becoming a major health problem that affects millions of people worldwide. In support of this observation, the World Health Organization estimates that every year, 2.4 million people die because of the effects of air pollution on health. Mitigation strategies such as changes in diesel engine technology could result in fewer premature mortalities, as suggested by the US Environm...

BACKGROUND The emerging consensus that exposure to near-roadway traffic-related pollution causes asthma has implications for compact urban development policies designed to reduce driving and greenhouse gases. OBJECTIVES We estimated the current burden of childhood asthma-related disease attributable to near-roadway and regional air pollution in Los Angeles County (LAC) and the potential healt...

The effects of light pollution problems in metropolitan areas are investigated in this study. Areas of Hong Kong are used as the source of three typical study cases. One case represents the regional scale, a second represents the district scale, and a third represents the street scale. Two light pollution parameters, Night Sky Brightness (NSB) and Street Light Level (SLL), are the focus of the ...

Air pollution is increasingly recognized as a significant contributor to global health outcomes. A methodological framework for evaluating the global health-related outcomes of outdoor and indoor (household) air pollution is presented and validated for the year 2005. Ambient concentrations of PM2.5 are estimated with a combination of energy and atmospheric models, with detailed representation o...

This paper estimates costs associated with water pollution in the Olifants River Water Management Area (WMA) in South Africa, and, more specifically, the area represented by the Loskop Dam Water User Association. We focus on the impacts of salinisation on commercial irrigated agriculture, and of microbial pollution on the general population of the WMA, many of whom do not have access to municip...

The association between ambient air pollution exposure and hospitalization for cardiovascular events has been reported in several studies with conflicting results. A case-crossover design was used to investigate the effects of air pollution in 660 first-time myocardial infarction cases in Stockholm in 1993-1994, interviewed shortly after diagnosis using a standard protocol. Air pollution data c...

INTRODUCTION Experimental and epidemiological studies have reported associations between air pollution exposure, in particular related to vehicle exhaust, and cardiovascular disease. A potential pathophysiological pathway is pollution-induced pulmonary oxidative stress, with secondary systemic inflammation. Genetic polymorphisms in genes implicated in oxidative stress, such as GSTP1, GSTT1 and ...