Air Pollution

This newsletter reports on a third study under way in Europe to complete the comprehensive HEI effort to examine the potential health effects of air pollution at low levels; HEI's new research program focusing on the health effects of exposure to traffic-related pollution; and the GBD MAPS team's presentation of preliminary data on coal’s impact on health in China. In addition, it covers the publication of two new research reports covering novel statistical methods for studying pollutant mixtures and a “direct” approach evaluating the impact of air quality interventions through “causal inference” methods, as well as the retirement of HEI's Aaron Cohen, a strategy session held with HEI's sponsors, and HEI in the news.

This report is Part 3 of HEI Research Report 183, Development of Statistical Methods for Multipollutant Research. It describes a study to develop and apply statistical methods to analyze the effects of multipollutant exposures on health, expanding beyond the two-pollutant approaches used in many studies to date. HEI funded three innovative studies in recent years to improve the tools for analyzing complex multipollutant exposures. In this last report from these studies, John Molitor and colleagues describe a Bayesian framework to identify spatial clusters of air pollution exposures — and other covariates such as socioeconomic status — and estimated pregnancy outcomes associated with those clusters, using a data set for Los Angeles county. 

This Executive Summary of the Advanced Collaborative Emissions Study (ACES) summarizes the main findings of emissions and health testing of new-technology heavy-duty diesel engines capable of meeting US 2007/2010 and EURO VI/6 diesel emissions standards. The results demonstrated the dramatic improvements in emissions and the absence of any significant health effects (especially cancer). ACES was the most comprehensive examination done to date of engines meeting the US 2007 and 2010 on-road standards.