Title

Subnational trend, attributable burden of diseases, and inequality analysis of exposing to tropospheric ozone in Iran from 1990 to 2010

Principal Investigator

Dr. Hasan Amini

Abstract

Air pollution is among those environmental factors which is associated with development and has risks for human’s health. There are strong evidences about the undesired health effect of ambient air pollution in developed and developing countries. Official reports of responsible organizations in Iran for air quality measurements show that the concentrations of pollutants in many cities of Iran, especially in mega-cities, are above the standard levels. The national studies on the health impact assessment of air pollution are rare and limited to a specific time and place. They have been mainly about the association of air pollutants and some health outcomes, such as cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases, low birth weight, etc., and there is no comprehensive study to quantify these unfavorable impacts in the country, which is partly due to lack of a national data bank. This study tried to gather all of the current data in the country and also use existent satellite-based data from the Global Burden of Disease 2010 study. This study is the first to collect all the data of air quality in Iran measured by Department of Environment. In addition, this is the first study that estimated annual mean of pollutants for 3,019 cities and villages of Iran by using existent satellite-based data. Although we could not gather all the measured data throughout the country, we could provide a great mega-data for conducting health research on air pollution in Iran. Based on the results of this study, there are high financial and human resources needs to conduct air quality monitoring campaigns in the country. The challenges that decreased the quality of the data are not existence of an integrated monitoring network, lack of expertise in cleaning, archiving, reporting, basics of statistics, and importance of air pollution data by national environmental experts, not existence of a specific mechanism and schedule to report data to Tehran’s Department of Environment, strict security vision about the data, etc, which all could be resolved through simple plans

Year

2015