Personal exposure and inhalation doses to PM1 and PM2.5 pollution in Iraq: An examination of four transport modes

Abstract

Particulate matter (PM) is a major indicator of urban air quality deterioration due to its impact on human health, atmospheric visibility and climate change. However, sufficient data on personal exposure to air pollution is still rare or unavailable in developing countries such as Iraq. Thus, this paper investigated the personal exposure and inhalation doses of PM1 and PM2.5 in Al-Hillah city, Iraq, for four common motorized transportation modes, namely open windows car, closed window car, bus, and motorbike. A portable monitoring device was used to collect the data during morning and afternoon hours in two main streets in the city. A t-test examination of the obtained results showed that the mean exposure concentration for both PM2.5 and PM1 were significantly different in the two streets form most of the transportation modes. The difference in the means of the measured PM1 and PM2.5 in the morning and afternoon trips were statistically significant for all the transportation modes except for bus in 60 street. This highlights the special and temporal variation of air pollution in the city. This is largely due the deteriorated infrastructure and lack of control policies in the city. Overall, PM2.5 and PM1 measured exposure concentrations were higher in the morning trips than in the afternoon ones. Regardless of the time or place of measurements, closed windows cars always had the lowest exposure concentrations to PM1 and PM2.5. The alarming observation in this study was the high levels of PM1 and PM2.5 that exceeded the recommended WHO limits, and were higher than the reported concentrations in the world bank database. The study findings present preliminary data on personal exposure concentrations and inhalation doses for travelers in Al-Hillah city, which can be utilized for global studies of air contamination in countries in similar situations as Iraq and for developing local control strategies.