158 Keynote: Useful Measurements of Air Pollutants for Evaluating their Impacts on Health

Abstract

Abstract UK air pollution is an acknowledged current problem and will change significantly over coming decades, driven by national and local policies to reduce PM2.5 and NO2 emissions and by transition to a low carbon economy, including energy-efficient affordable urban housebuilding programmes. This should reduce outdoor pollution and infiltration indoors, whilst increasing exposure to poorly defined indoor polluted atmospheres. Whilst several common pollutants are routinely measured for regulatory compliance, characterisation of the complex mixture of airborne pollutants to provide comprehensive chemical fingerprinting is only available to a few specialised research groups, particularly for PM. Moreover, there is extremely low spatial coverage and resolution provided by routine measurements and little or no coverage of the indoor environment. Deployment of low-cost sensors promises to plug some of these gaps, and may provide some information about pollution levels. However, there remain substantial questions around the accuracy, specificity, and general utility of these sensors, particularly in relation to the differential toxicity of pollutants and hence their effects on human health. Nonetheless, widespread deployment of low-cost sensor data might provide highly useful information on the spatial exposure to hazard if supplemented by suitable source attributed toxicological information, chemical fingerprinting of PM and relationships between activity and chemically speciated pollutants. This presentation will outline some of the tools and approaches at our disposal to evaluate current and possible future health effects of air pollutants.