Abstract
There is an increasing body of evidence showing the impact of air pollutants on human health such as on the respiratory, and cardio- and cerebrovascular systems. In China, as people begin to pay more attention to air quality, recent research focused on the quantitative assessment of the effects of air pollutants on human health. To assess the health effects of air pollutants and to construct an indicator placing emphasis on health impact, a generalized additive model was selected to assess the health burden caused by air pollution. We obtained Baidu indices (an evaluation indicator launched by Baidu Corporation to reflect the search popularity of keywords from its search engine) to assess daily query frequencies of 25 keywords considered associated with air pollution-related diseases. Moreover, we also calculated the daily concentrations of major air pollutants (including PM10, PM2.5, SO2, O3, NO2, and CO) and the daily air quality index (AQI) values, and three meteorological factors: daily mean wind level, daily mean air temperature, and daily mean relative humidity. These data cover the area of Beijing from 1 March 2015 to 30 April 2017. Through the analysis, we produced the relative risks (RRs) of the six main air pollutants for respiratory, and cardio- and cerebrovascular diseases. The results showed that O3 and NO2 have the highest health impact, followed by PM10 and PM2.5. The effects of any pollutant on cardiovascular diseases was consistently higher than on respiratory diseases. Furthermore, we evaluated the currently used AQI in China and proposed an RR-based index (health AQI, HAQI) that is intended for better indicating the effects of air pollutants on respiratory, and cardio- and cerebrovascular diseases than AQI. A higher Pearson correlation coefficient between HAQI and RRTotal than that between AQI and RRTotal endorsed our efforts.
Highlights
Respiratory, and cardio- and cerebrovascular diseases are generally considered associated with air pollution
According to the algorithm provided by the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) Data Center, the AQI takes the maximum of the six individual air quality index (IAQI) values (SO2, NO2, particulate matter smaller than 10 micrometers (PM10), PM2.5, O3, and CO)
We focused on the evaluation of the short-term effect of air pollution on human health
Summary
Respiratory, and cardio- and cerebrovascular diseases are generally considered associated with air pollution. The more significant the linear correlation is between increase in search volumes and increase in cases, the better the Baidu index is taken as a surrogate of disease occurrences This assumption is not uncommon in some studies based on internet searches [28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35]. The Baidu index, deemed as representing symptom searches of respiratory, and cerebro- and cardiovascular diseases, was exploited in the place of hospital outpatient data to model the impact of air pollutants on human health. We proposed a relative risk (RR)-based index that is supposed to better indicate the health risk of air pollution ( respiratory, and cerebro- and cardiovascular diseases), and compared it with China’s current air quality index (AQI) adopted by the Ministry of Environmental Protection. This new index can be used for health risk evaluation in our future mapping of the effect of air pollution on health in Beijing and the Chinese populations
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