Abstract
This article briefly reviews evidence of health effects associated with exposure to particulate matter (PM) air pollution from five common outdoor emission sources: traffic, coal-fired power stations, diesel exhaust, domestic wood combustion heaters, and crustal dust. The principal purpose of this review is to compare the evidence of health effects associated with these different sources with a view to answering the question: Is exposure to PM from some emission sources associated with worse health outcomes than exposure to PM from other sources? Answering this question will help inform development of air pollution regulations and environmental policy that maximises health benefits. Understanding the health effects of exposure to components of PM and source-specific PM are active fields of investigation. However, the different methods that have been used in epidemiological studies, along with the differences in populations, emission sources, and ambient air pollution mixtures between studies, make the comparison of results between studies problematic. While there is some evidence that PM from traffic and coal-fired power station emissions may elicit greater health effects compared to PM from other sources, overall the evidence to date does not indicate a clear ‘hierarchy’ of harmfulness for PM from different emission sources. Further investigations of the health effects of source-specific PM with more advanced approaches to exposure modeling, measurement, and statistics, are required before changing the current public health protection approach of minimising exposure to total PM mass.
Highlights
Woolcock Institute of Medical Research, University of Sydney, 431 Glebe Point Road, Glebe, Sydney, The Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney Medical School, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
Most of the articles that were examined for this review did not compare the health effects associated with particulate matter (PM) air pollution from different sources, but instead were studies of the health effects associated with PM from a single emission source
For those epidemiological studies that investigated health outcomes associated with PM from at least two of the five emission sources examined in this review, we quantitatively compare the relative risks associated with an increase in exposure to the different source-specific PM
Summary
Woolcock Institute of Medical Research, University of Sydney, 431 Glebe Point Road, Glebe, Sydney, The Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney Medical School, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. This article briefly reviews evidence of health effects associated with exposure to particulate matter (PM) air pollution from five common outdoor emission sources: traffic, coal-fired power stations, diesel exhaust, domestic wood combustion heaters, and crustal dust. The principal purpose of this review is to compare the evidence of health effects associated with these different sources with a view to answering the question: Is exposure to PM from some emission sources associated with worse health outcomes than exposure to PM from other sources? While there is some evidence that PM from traffic and coal-fired power station emissions may elicit greater health effects compared to PM from other sources, overall the evidence to date does not indicate a clear ‘hierarchy’ of harmfulness for PM from different emission sources. The Global Burden of Diseases Study 2015 has estimated the global extent of the health burden of exposure to ambient PM air pollution, with 7.6% of global deaths and 4.2% of global disability-adjusted life years in 2015 attributable to exposure to PM with aerodynamic diameter less than 2.5 μm (PM2.5 ) [1]
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