Elsevier

Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety

Volume 180, 30 September 2019, Pages 542-548
Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety

Concentrations and health effects of short- and long-term exposure to PM2.5, NO2, and O3 in ambient air of Ahvaz city, Iran (2014–2017)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoenv.2019.05.026Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Attributed short and long term morbidity for PM2.5, NO2 and O3 was assessed.

  • Year-specific city population and baseline incidence of the health outcomes were obtained.

  • Number of death cases for IHD, COPD, lung cancer, and ALRI attributed to PM2.5 was estimated.

  • The attributable health effects of ozone were low and negligible.

Abstract

The primary objective of the present study was to evaluate the concentrations and short and long-term excess mortality attributed to PM2.5, NO2, and O3 observed in ambient air of Ahvaz during March 2014 to March 2017 period using the AirQ + software developed by the World Health Organization (WHO), which is updated in 2016 by WHO European Centre for Environment and Health. The hourly concentrations of PM2.5, O3, and NO2 measured at different regulatory monitoring network stations in Ahvaz city were obtained from the Department of Environment (DOE) of the city. Then, for various air quality monitoring stations, the 24-h average concentration of PM2.5, 1-h average of NO2 concentration, and maximum daily 8-h O3 concentrations were calculated using Excel 2010 software. When the maximum daily 8-h ozone means exceeding the value of 35, it was subtracted from 35 to calculate SOMO35 indicator for modeling. Validation of air quality data was performed according to the Aphekom and WHO's methodologies for health impact assessment of air pollution. Year-specific city population and baseline incidence of the health outcomes were obtained. The three-year averages of PM2.5, NO2, and O3 concentrations were 68.95 (±39.86) μg/m3, 135.90 (±47.82) μg/m3, and 38.63 (±12.83) parts-per-billion-volume (ppbv), respectively. SOMO35 values of ozone were 6596.66, 3411.78, and 470.88 ppbv in 2014–2015, 2015–2016, and 2016-2017 years, respectively. The AP and number of natural deaths due to NO2 were higher than PM2.5 except the last year (2016–2017), causing about 39.18%, 40.73%, and 14.39% of deaths within the first, the second, and the third year, respectively. However, for the last year, the natural mortality for PM2.5 was higher than NO2 (34.46% versus 14.39%). The total number of natural mortality caused by PM2.5 and NO2 in all years was 4061 and 4391, respectively. A significant number of deaths was estimated to be attributed to the given air pollutants. It can be concluded that by designing and implementing air pollution control strategies and actions, both health effects and economic losses will be prevented.

Introduction

Ambient air pollution is a major cause of death and disability in the current world. According to a report by the World Health Organization (WHO), 3.7 million deaths were estimated to be attributed to urban and rural outdoor air pollution worldwide (WHO, 2014). Global Burden of Disease (GBD) and the World Bank introduced air pollution as the fifth and fourth health risk factor globally, respectively (Global Burden of Disease (GBD), 2015; World Bank, 2016). By considering the particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter of 2.5 μm or less (PM2.5), it is reported that approximately 87% of the people in the world are living in areas with PM2.5 concentrations higher than the WHO guidelines. In countries with low and middle income, about 90% of the population faces unsafe concentrations of air pollution (Brauer et al., 2016; World Bank, 2016). The health effects attributed to air pollution induce financial burden to economics as well. The global total welfare losses and the decrease in the gross domestic product (GDP) due to air pollution were 31 million USD and 2.48% in 2013, respectively (World Bank, 2016). The associations between air pollution and various adverse health outcomes have been investigated in numerous studies worldwide (Anderson et al., 2004; Brunekreef and Forsberg, 2005; Dehghani et al., 2018; Delikhoon et al., 2018; Hassanvand et al., 2017; Mohseni Bandpi et al., 2017; Motesaddi Zarandi et al., 2015). Beelen et al. (2014) performed a cohort study to investigate 22 European regarding the relationships between several air pollutants and natural mortality, and it was found that PM2.5 concentrations even lower than the European annual mean limit value of 25 μg/m3 was associated to the natural mortality. The associations were not statistically significant for nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulates with a diameter of 10 μm or less (PM10). Raaschou-Nielsen et al. (2013) evaluated the association between long-term exposure to outdoor air pollution and lung cancer incidence in 17 European cohorts. The meta-analyses showed that there is a significant relationship between lung cancer and exposure to PM2.5, with a hazard ratio (HR) of 1·18 (CI 95%, 0·96–1·46) per 5 μg/m3. Yang et al. (2018) reported that several air pollutants such as PM1, PM2.5, PM10, SO2, NO2, and O3 are significantly associated with metabolic syndrome. Since air pollution imposes a remarkable number of mortality and morbidity of diseases, it is critical to quantify its health effects in each society. In addition to health-related purposes, these results provide a reasonable basis for lawmakers and authorities to set new air pollution standard limits to increase the budget for strategies and actions for reducing ambient air pollution (Jo, 2014). Health impact assessment (HIA) is a method to quantify the number of deaths or hospital admissions attributed to a risk factor such as outdoor air pollution (Pascal et al., 2011). In recent years, several tools have been developed by different agencies for HIA of air pollution, including AirQ, BenMAP, Aphekom, and AirQ+. AirQ+ was developed by the WHO in 2016 for HIA of short- and long-term exposure to indoor and outdoor air pollution, and contains exposure-response functions and relative risk (RR) values reported in recent epidemiological studies (Burnett et al., 2014; Hoek et al., 2013; Naddafi et al., 2012; WHO, 2013). So far, limited studies have been conducted using AirQ+ (Faridi et al., 2018; Hadei et al., 2017a, 2017b, 2018; Hopke et al., 2018; Yarahmadi et al., 2018). For conducting an HIA study by AirQ+, some input data should be provided including air quality data, total and at-risk population of the city, baseline incidence of the health outcome per 100,000 of population, relative risk (RR) values from epidemiological studies, and cut-off value for air quality. AirQ + quantifies the health effects only for concentrations higher than that cut-off value (WHO, 2016a). Ahvaz is a megacity in the southwestern part of Iran and is located in an arid region. The annual average of PM10 concentrations in Ahvaz was 231 μg/m3 during 2016, which made this city as the third most polluted city in the world (Naimabadi et al., 2016; WHO, 2016b). In addition to petrochemical industries and traffic-related air pollution, Ahvaz is faced with the repetitive occurrence of the Middle Eastern dust storms in recent years (Farsani et al., 2018; Goudarzi et al., 2019; Marzouni et al., 2017). These dust storms originate from arid areas inside and outside of Iran, leading to high concentrations of PM, particularly PM10 and PM2.5 (Naimabadi et al., 2018; Neisi et al., 2018; Shahsavani et al., 2012). Since PM2.5 particulate penetrates into deeper parts of the lung, it can cause some more dangerous and detrimental health effects compared with PM10. Therefore, in this study, PM2.5 was selected as important ambient air pollutant to investigate its health effects. In addition, it has been reported that PM2.5, O3, and NO2 are the most consistent and rather independent predictors of health effects of ambient air pollution (Faridi et al., 2018). Therefore, we focus here on these three key indicators of ambient air pollution. The extremely polluted ambient air of Ahvaz causes adverse effects on human health. The use of AirQ + for HIA of air pollution has been limited. The results of AirQ + will be based on the new epidemiological findings. In addition, there is no comprehensive study to quantify the health effects attributed to several air pollutants in Ahvaz until now. Considering multiple pollutants such as PM2.5, NO2, and O3 for HIA can better present the health effects of ambient air pollution. Therefore, the present study was aimed to evaluate the concentrations and short- and long-term health effects attributed to PM2.5, NO2, and O3 observed in Ahvaz during the March 2014–March 2017 period using the AirQ + modeling tool.

Section snippets

The study area, period, and estimation procedure

This study focused on the excess mortality and morbidity attributed to short-term and long-term exposure to PM2.5, NO2, and O3 in Ahvaz, Iran, during March 21, 2014–March 20, 2017 period. The total population of Ahvaz in the first, second, and third period were 1170231, 1177487, and 1184788, respectively. We obtained the value of the population of the city from the Statistical Centre of Iran. The population of the first year was based on the census that is carried out every 5 years. Then, the

Results and discussion

Yearly health effects attributed to exposure to ambient PM2.5, NO2, and O3 were estimated using the WHO's AirQ + modeling software (WHO, 2016a). To interpret our results correctly, it should be noted that the health effects attributed to PM2.5 and NO2 were calculated only for the concentrations higher than WHO's guideline values. In addition, O3 health effects were estimated for the concentrations higher than 35 ppbv.

The annual averages and standard deviations of the pollutants are illustrated

Conclusion

We investigated the short- and long-term health effects attributed to exposure to PM2.5, NO2, and O3 in Ahvaz during a three-year period using AirQ + model. The pollutants' concentrations were much higher than the WHO's guideline values. The short-term health effects of PM2.5 were higher than NO2. However, the long-term effects of NO2 were greater than those of PM2.5. The attributable health effects of ozone were low and negligible. In general, a significant number of deaths were estimated to

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the Department of Environment of Ahvaz city to provide us the related data as well as to the Air Pollution and Respiratory Diseases Research Center of Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences for funding (APRD-9602) and providing necessary facilities to perform this research.

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