News

Indoor Air Pollution and Health (IAPAH)

There is a significant body of evidence linking outdoor air pollution with health but very little is known about the health effects of poor air quality in homes. This study is funded by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency STRIVE programme, and is part of collaboration between the University of Aberdeen, the Institute of Occupational Medicine in Edinburgh, and the National University of Ireland at Galway. The project aims to quantify the health effects of indoor air pollution that arises from the combustion of fuels and/or tobacco within the home. Beginning in May 2009, we will identify and recruit 50 households in both Ireland and Scotland that fulfil one of the following criteria:

use of biomass fuels (coal, wood or peat) as a heating source in the house; or
the regular presence of a cigarette smoker; or
use of gas cookers/stoves are the primary cooking device, or a gas fire within the living room

Using a range of measuring devices we will collect data on airborne concentrations of fine particulate dust, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and endotoxin over the autumn and winter months within the main living area of the home. In addition we will measure and log temperature and relative humidity within the home.

It is our intention to address questions such as whether different fuels used for combustion produce different levels of IAPs, or whether factors such as house type influence IAP concentrations. We aim to make comparisons between IAP levels found in smoking and non-smoking households and to explore what co-relationships exist between different indoor air pollutants.

While methods for health impact assessment (HIA) of pollution from outdoor sources are well developed and widely used to support policy development, there is no established methodology for HIA of pollution from indoor sources. We intend to adapt these methods, and apply them to exposures from indoor combustion sources.

Through targeted literature review and evaluation we will examine the known dose-response relationships for long term exposures to outdoor air pollutants and how transferable they are to the concentrations and particle sources found in domestic environments of interest to the study. The data collected from the homes in Ireland and Scotland will be combined with the derived exposure-response coefficients from the literature survey to generate an estimate of total health burden attributable to indoor air pollution from combustion sources across the Irish and Scottish populations.

For information on the STRIVE programme:

http://www.epa.ie/researchandeducation/research/funding/apply

NUI Galway webpage: http://www.nuigalway.ie/iapah/iapah.html;

Institute of Occupational Medicine, Edinburgh: http://www.iom-world.org/

For further details please contact either Carole Garden at c.garden@abdn.ac.uk or Dr Sean Semple at sean.semple@abdn.ac.uk.

30th April 2009