Professional Documents
Culture Documents
4253-4254 1997
1997 Elsevier Science Ltd
All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain
Perganlon
PlI: S1352--2310(97)00109-X
1352-2310/97 $17.00+0.00
NEW DIRECTIONS
TOWARDS BETTER H U M A N EXPOSURE ESTIMATES FOR SETTING
OF AIR QUALITY STANDARDS
The adverse health effects associated with urban
air pollution, which include respiratory morbidity,
cardiovascular diseases and mortality, have contributed in creating public awareness of this kind of
pollution. Health risk evaluation and assessment
have now become important since these serve as
the basis for any re-formulation or review of
current air quality standards. While such standards
are intended to protect public health and the
environment in general, they may have a negative
impact on the economy of the region (as discussed
by S. K. Friedlander and M. Lippmann, in
Environmental Science and Technology, 28, pp.
148A-150A, 1994). Hence, exact measurements and
modelling of human exposures to environmental
pollutants are of crucial importance for the realistic
evaluation of public health risk and setting of
standards.
If we assume the pollutant concentration to be
spatially uniform over some three-dimensional
space (technically called a microenvironment) such
as the volume of an office or the confines of a
street, then the exposure for a person is calculated
as the product of the pollutant concentration
and time spent in that microenvironment. The
integrated human exposure would be the sum
of all such products. This assumption of spatial
uniformity in exposure models used in impact
assessments can be erroneous for certain microenvironments. The fact that fixed air monitoring
stations observe air quality levels that are different
from those people come into contact with in
their daily lives, was identified as early as 1980 by
W. R. Ott at Stanford University (Department of
Statistics Technical Report No. 32). More recently,
J. J. Vostal pointed out in Environmental Health
Perspectives (102, Supplement 4, pp. 101-106, 1994)
that oversimplified assumptions are frequently made
in exposure estimates, such as that pollutant
concentrations in various microenvironments are
identical to those recorded by remote air quality
monitors.
One microenvironment o f particular note is
the city street. We have developed a 'Street Level
Air Quality' (SLAQ) model (to be presented by
A. Micallef, R. B. Singh and J. J. Coils at the
l lth Annual Conference of The Aerosol Society,
U.K., 1997). This was run for different traffic and
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