Building stronger public health institutions (BIS) project: Deciphering the burden of air pollution in Ethiopia, (2021-2025)

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Linking air pollution and health at a national level demands the use of a wide variety of data. The current state of science and practice recommends, countries to monitor pollutant concentrations in microenvironments and through satellite technologies. For this reason, countries with better policies and regulations are relentlessly assessing population exposure to air pollutants using air monitoring systems, from fixed atmospheric monitoring stations, atmospheric dispersion modelling, or spatial interpolation techniques for pollutant concentrations. Moreover, the use of systematic diseases surveillance system to document diseases distribution tandem with census data, administrative registers, and data on the patterns of the time-based activities at the individual scale, allowed them to better understand the burden of air pollution. Hitherto, Ethiopia has not established a national air pollution and health impact surveillance program or system to generate data that can be translated into policy or action. For this reason, the global burden of diseases lacks to present the full depiction of Ethiopia. This was ascribed to the dearth of information available on temporal and spatially representative ambient and indoor air quality monitoring efforts; inadequate documentation of population exposure, activity pattern, and diseases incidence to represent wide range of the social fabric. To this effect, the Norwegian public health institute (NIPH) through its four years program, building stronger public health institutions (BIS) (2021-2025), agreed to work with the Ethiopian public health institute (EPHI), to develop environmental epidemiological studies, to link air pollution and health. In doing so, establishing monitoring sites in collaboration with pertinent national authorities will be the first phase of the project. The second milestone will be identifying sentinel sites so as to track sex and age specific mortality and morbidity data of non-communicable diseases attributed to air pollution. Overall, the epidemiological studies will benefit Ethiopia to understand the burden of air pollution.