Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Modelling Exposure to Health Risks from Air Pollution

Combining Regional- and Local-Scale Air Quality Models with Exposure Models for Use in Environmental Health Studies (12 page pdf, Vlad Isakov, Jawad S. Touma, and Janet Burke, Danelle T. Lobdell, Ted Palma, Arlene Rosenbaum, Haluk Ozkaynak, Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association, Vol. 59:461– 472, Apr. 2009)

Also discussed here: Community-Focused Exposure and Risk Screening Tool (C-FERST) (EPA, Human Exposure and Atmospheric Science)

And here: The EPA's human exposure research program for assessing cumulative risk in communities (Valerie G Zartarian and Bradley D Schultz, Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology (2010) 20, 351–358; Apr.15, 2009)

And here: EPA’s Community-Focused Exposure and Risk Screening Tool: C-FERST and its potential use for EJ efforts(63 slide pdf, Valerie G. Zartarian, B. Schultz, M. Smuts, T. Barzyk, D. Hammond, M. Medina-Vera, A. Geller, Strengthening Environmental Justice Research and Decision Making Symposium, Mar. 18, 2010)

Today’s focus is on ways of measuring the exposure of humans to air pollution and the models being used to assess the health risks, including the EPA’s Community-Focused Exposure and Risk Screening Tool (C-FERST), the Hazardous Air Pollutant Exposure Model [HAPEM] and the Stochastic Human Exposure and Dose Simulation [SHEDS] model. The noted links point to reports that describe how each functions. One conclusion is that the complex patterns and gradients in air pollution across a city requires more than one or two representative measurement points if one needs to adequately define the health risk to urban communities.



Key Quotes:

“Communities want to understand their environmental issues in the context of risk.. rely on risk perception if difficulties accessing, interpreting data”

“The Community-Focused Exposure and Risk Screening Tool (C-FERST).. is a “one-stop shop” GIS and resource access Web tool for conducting community assessments”

“Future versions of C-FERST ..: ongoing human exposure science; collaboration/integration with ecological research; integration with other tools; more fully populated exposure/risk maps and environmental issue profiles; building capacity for more complete cumulative assessment and risk ranking; incorporation of EPA cumulative risk guidance and non-chemical stressors research; "what-if" scenarios for assessing impacts of community actions; incorporation of more sustainability aspects”

“Understanding relationships between sources of air pollution, ambient air concentrations, and exposures is fundamental to developing effective air pollution standards and regulations.”

“Population-based human exposure models predict the distribution of personal exposures to pollutants of outdoor origin using a variety of inputs, including air pollution concentrations; human activity patterns, such as the amount of time spent outdoors versus indoors, commuting, walking, and indoors at home; microenvironmental infiltration rates; and pollutant removal rates in indoor environments”

“The results indicate that there is a strong spatial gradient in the predicted mean exposure concentrations near roadways and industrial facilities that can vary by almost a factor of 2 across the urban area studied”

“our results indicate 20–30% differences due to commuting patterns and almost a factor of 2 difference because of near-roadway effects”

“these studies assume that a single monitor, or an average of only a few monitors, is representative of complex patterns of exposures within a large urban area”

“exposure models are designed to utilize modeled air concentrations, combined with human activity data and indoor/outdoor relationships for pollutants, to estimate distributions of exposures for populations of interest”
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