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Thursday, 26 July 2012

Most people understand that air pollution is bad for your health, but there has been little long-term research to prove it.

A team at the School of Population Health is leading an international collaboration in Australia's first study into the health impacts associated with long-term air pollution exposure.

Team leader Professor Jane Heyworth said most studies comparing air pollution with human health outcomes focused on the effects of short-term exposure.

"But we understand that long-term exposure may have more of an effect on human health, and especially on the health of elderly people," she said. The group is using health data from UWA 's Centre for Health and Ageing's Health in Long term health links with air quality Men study cohort. This study, led by Winthrop Professor Leon Flicker and funded by an NHMRC grant, began monitoring elderly men's health in 1996.

"We have access to their health data through the Western Australian Data Linkage System, and we can link that with the Department of Environment and Conservation's air quality monitoring from eight sites around Perth," Professor Heyworth said.

The group is doing additional monitoring at 44 sites over two-week periods, three times a year. They are measuring nitrous oxides, predominantly from motor vehicles, and particulates, which encompass dust particles from traffic, bush fires, construction, power generation and industry in general, even including sea salt, in coastal areas.

Particulate matter is being measured using Harvard impactors and nitrogen dioxide with Ogawa passive diffusion badges. The locations around Perth, from Yanchep to Rockingham and east to Hovea, have been selected to represent different patterns in air pollution: streets with lots of traffic and those with little traffic; streets in remote areas with low population densities and city streets with higher densities.

The measurements taken by the UWA team will be combined with two modelling approaches (Dispersion and Land Use Regression modelling by CSIRO) to help classify how much air pollution each of the participants are exposed to at their home address.

The UWA group of Professor Heyworth, project co-ordinator Anna-Lena Arnold and research officer Christina Tsou, are joined in the study by teams from The WA Centre for Health and Ageing, Edith Cowan University, CSIRO, the Centre for Environmental Epidemiology, Barcelona, Spain and the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences, Utrecht, Netherlands.

The collaborative study is part of ESCAPE : European Study Cohort for Air Pollution Effects, a group which includes Taiwan and China as well as European states.

A member of ESCAPE from the Netherlands joined the UWA team in January this year to help them set up and use the monitoring equipment they are borrowing from the consortium.

"We have lower levels of air pollution than elsewhere in the world," Professor Heyworth said. "The patterns are quite different from Europe where there are higher, denser populations, road canyons, more diesel vehicles and more apartment living. So we are adding a different perspective to the global picture.

"This is the first study in Australia to address the health impacts associated with long-term air pollution exposure and individual health outcomes including respiratory and cardiovascular morbidity, mortality and disease biomarkers.

"The results will provide information on what types of pollutants are harmful to human health. It will be made available to the public and provided to agencies planning intervention strategies aimed at reducing exposure to possibly harmful pollutants."

Published in UWA News , 23 July 2012

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