Commuting-adjusted short-term health impact assessment of airborne fine particles with uncertainty quantification via Monte Carlo simulation.

Abstract

Background: Exposure to air pollution is associated with a short-term increase in mortality, and this field has begun to focus on health impact assessment.Objectives: Our aim was to estimate the impact of PM10 on mortality within 2 days from the exposure in the Italian region of Lombardy for the year 2007, at the municipality level, examining exposure entailed by daily intermunicipality commuting and accounting for uncertainty propagation.Methods: We combined data from different sources to derive probabilistic distributions for all input quantities used to calculate attributable deaths (mortality rates, PM10 concentrations, estimated PM10 effects, and commuting flows) and applied a Monte Carlo procedure to propagate uncertainty and sample the distribution of attributable deaths for each municipality.Results: We estimated that annual average PM10 concentrations above the World Health Organization-recommended threshold of 20 μg/m3 were responsible for 865 short-term deaths (80% credibility interval: 475, 1,401), 26% of which were attributable to PM10 above the European Union limit of 40 μg/m3. Reducing annual average PM10 concentrations > 20 μg/m3 by 20% would have reduced the number of attributable deaths by 36%. The largest estimated impacts were along the basin of the Po River and in the largest cities. Commuting contributed to the spatial distribution of the estimated impact.Conclusions: Our estimates, which incorporated uncertainty quantification, indicate that the short-term impact of PM10 on mortality in Lombardy in 2007 was notable, and that reduction in air pollution would have had a substantial beneficial effect on population health. Using commuting data helped to identify critical areas for prioritizing intervention.Citation: Baccini M, Grisotto L, Catelan D, Consonni D, Bertazzi PA, Biggeri A. 2015. Commuting-adjusted short-term health impact assessment of airborne fine particles with uncertainty quantification via Monte Carlo simulation. Environ Health Perspect 123:27–33; http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1408218