Global Health

This report describes a unique collaboration among investigators from Europe, the United States, and Canada using existing data from three geographic areas and supported by HEI in collaboration with the European Commission. APHENA offered a large and diverse data set with which to address methodological as well as scientific issues about the relationships between PM₁₀, ozone, and mortality and morbidity that were the subject of lively debates at the time the project was launched. 

Research Report 139 describes a study in the Netherlands using data from the ongoing Netherlands Cohort Study (NLCS) on diet and cancer. The study is one of the first to systematically assess longer term exposure and mortality in a well characterized European population; it followed a pilot study of 5000 adults randomly selected from the NLCS cohort conducted by the same team of investigators. For the current study, Dr.

Research Report 138, Health Effects of Real-World Exposure to Diesel Exhaust in Persons with Asthma, is one part of HEI's larger program on the role of particles in exacerbating asthma and other allergic diseases. This report describes a study to evaluate how inhaling air with a high concentration of diesel exhaust from vehicular traffic while walking on a busy street in Central London might affect people who had either mild or moderate asthma. Dr.

Research Report 134 describes a study that evaluated whether there was an association between particles detectable in the airways of healthy children and a) estimates of local, traffic-derived PM₁₀ at the children's home addresses or b) their lung function. Dr. Jonathan Grigg and colleagues recruited 116 healthy children aged 8 to 15 years who lived in Leicester, UK. In addition to modeling each child's exposure, the investigators measured lung function and evaluated induced sputum for particles in airway macrophages and markers of inflammation.