Title

 National and subnational trends in exposure to BENZENE from 1990 to 2010 in Iran and study of its burden ans inequality analysis of this distribution

Principal Investigator

Mansour Shamsipour

Abstract

Air pollution is among those environmental risk factors that affects human’s development and health. There are strong evidences about detrimental health effects of ambient air pollution on humansworldwide. 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 well 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 effects on population health in country level. This is partly due to lack of a national data bank, especially for exposures. This study tried to gather all of the current data in the country . This study is the first to collect all the data of air quality in Iran measured by Department of Environment, other responsible organizations, and also the works of individual researchers. Although we might not be able to gather all measured data throughout the country, we try to 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 non- 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, non-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

2013