This guideline covers road-traffic-related air pollution and its links to ill health. It aims to improve
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air quality and so prevent a range of health conditions and deaths.
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This report summarizes the latest scientific knowledge on the links between exposure to air pollution and adverse health effects in children. It is intended
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to inform and motivate individual and collective action by health care professionals to prevent damage to children’s health from exposure to air pollution. Air pollution is a major environmental health threat. Exposure to fine particles in both the ambient environment and in the household causes about seven million premature deaths each year. Ambient air pollution (AAP) alone imposes enormous costs on the global economy, amounting to more than US$ 5 trillion in total welfare losses in 2013.
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The global burden of disease associated with air pollution exposure exacts a massive toll on human health worldwide: exposure to air pollution is e
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stimated to cause millions of deaths and lost years of healthy life annually. The burden of disease attributable to air pollution is now estimated to be on a par with other major global health risks such as unhealthy diet and tobacco smoking, and air pollution is now recognized as the single biggest environmental threat to human health.
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This guideline covers indoor air quality in residential buildings. It aims to raise awareness of the importance of good air quality in people's hom
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es and how to achieve this.
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Exposure to air pollution causes 7 million deaths worldwide every year and costs an estimated US$ 5.11 trillion in welfare losses globally. In the 15 countries that emit the most greenhouse gas emis
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sions, the health impacts of air pollution are estimated to cost more than 4% of their GDP. Actions to meet the Paris goals would cost around 1% of global GDP. The report provides recommendations for governments on how to maximize the health benefits of tackling climate change and avoid the worst health impacts of this global challenge.
It describes how countries around the world are now taking action to protect lives from the impacts of climate change – but that the scale of support remains woefully inadequate, particularly for the small island developing states, and least developed countries. Only approximately 0.5% of multilateral climate funds dispersed for climate change adaptation have been allocated to health projects
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1 March 2021 This roadmap aims to define the key questions users should consider to assess indoor ventilation and the major steps needed to reach r
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ecommended ventilation levels or simply improve indoor air quality (IAQ) in order to reduce the risk of spread of COVID-19.
It also includes recommendations on how to assess and measure the different parameters, specifically in health care, non-residential and residential settings whenever a person is under home care or home quarantine.
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To enhance health co-benefits across urban policies which tackle air pollution and climate change, WHO, in cooperation with various international, national, and local partners, implemented the Urban
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Health Initiative (UHI) pilot project in Accra, Ghana. The Initiative prompted the health sector to use its influential position to demonstrate to decision-makers and the public the full range of health, environmental and economic benefits that can be achieved from implementing local emission reduction and energy access policies and strategies. Policy tracking, although not always considered, is a fundamental component of this procedure. It assesses the planning, implementation and progress of a policy to refine or adjust policies with the final objective of increasing the likelihood of the policy being successful. This report is an outcome of the last component of the UHI model process, Policy tracking and monitoring outcomes. The report proposes a framework for tracking urban health policies, with a special focus on the impacts of air quality and energy access on human health and well-being in African countries, giving some examples from the pilot project in Accra. The report also provides resources to survey air quality in cities and other tools to assess public health and the environmental impacts of urban policies and monitor or track their effects.
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This report summarizes the latest scientific knowledge on the links between exposure to air pollution and adverse health effects in children. It is intended
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to inform and motivate individual and collective action by health care professionals to prevent damage to children’s health from exposure to air pollution.
Air pollution is a major environmental health threat. Exposure to fine particles in both the ambient environment and in the household causes about seven million premature deaths each year. Ambient air pollution alone imposes enormous costs on the global economy, amounting to more than US$ 5 trillion in total welfare losses in 2013.
This public health crisis is receiving more attention, but one critical aspect is often overlooked: how air pollution affects children in uniquely damaging ways. Recent data released by the World Health Organization (WHO) show that air pollution has a vast and terrible impact on child health and survival. Globally, 93% of all children live in environments with air pollution levels above the WHO guidelines (see the full report, Air pollution and child health: prescribing clean air. More than one in every four deaths of children under 5 years of age is directly or indirectly related to environmental risks. Both ambient air pollution and household air pollution contribute to respiratory tract infections that resulted in 543 000 deaths in children under the age of 5 years in 2016.
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Updated with information on Ebola virus disease and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus
A wide variety of health events ranging in severity may occur related to air transport, requiring di
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fferent responses or, perhaps, no response at all. The target audience for this guidance document includes the national focal points (NFP) for the IHR and public health authorities at PoE, as well as national aviation regulatory authorities, airport operators and personnel, aircraft operators, air crew and other stakeholders involved in air transport and emergency preparedness and response to public health events
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During the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the world’s economy slowed. Yet, the global annual average particulate pollution (PM2.5) was largely unchanged from 2019 levels. At the same time, growing evidence shows air pollution—even when exp
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erienced at very low levels—hurts human health. This recently led the World Health Organization (WHO) to revise its guideline for what it considers a safe level of exposure of particulate pollution, bringing most of the world—97.3 percent of the global population—into the unsafe zone. The AQLI finds that particulate air pollution takes 2.2 years off global average life expectancy, or a combined 17 billion life-years, relative to a world that met the WHO guideline. This impact on life expectancy is comparable to that of smoking, more than three times that of alcohol use and unsafe water, six times that of HIV/AIDS, and 89 times that of conflict and terrorism.
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Background: The impacts of air pollutants on health range from short-term health impairments to hospital admissions
and deaths. Climate change is leading
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to an increase in air pollution.
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In spite of the work carried out by the EU institutions, the Member States, many cities and grassroot movements in Europe, the general public is still not engaging enough in air quality policy initiatives and the level of awareness and knowledge of
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the effects of poor air quality on health is often low.
HEAL, within its work with the EU urban air quality partnership has put together a toolkit on ‘Communicating on air quality and health – Inspiring practices, challenges and tips’, providing hands-on examples of how communication on air quality, the health links and (policy and behavioural) changes takes place, as an inspiration particularly for urban authorities wanting to communicate on clean air.
The Partnership on Air Quality was founded in 2016 with the main objective of improving air quality in cities and bringing the ‘healthy city’ higher on the local, national and EU agendas as part of the urban agenda.
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The Vienna Declaration was signed at the end of the Fifth High-level Meeting on Transport, Health and Environment. The virtual meeting, hosted by the Federal Government of Austria, brought together 46 ministers and representatives of 56 countries in the pan-European region.
The group discussed ho
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w to introduce substantial changes in transport and mobility systems in order to address multiple challenges such as ambient air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, physical inactivity and noncommunicable diseases, and social inequity in access to transport and mobility.
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This report challenges policy-makers and political leaders to tackle fossil fuel production and consumption as a health control issue, in the same way that smoking has been reduced and regulated. Fossil fuel combustion is a major source of toxic
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air pollution that kills 7 million people every year, almost the same as the number of deaths caused by tobacco smoking.
In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) recognised air pollution as a major health risk factor. There is widespread public discussion about the effects of fossil fuel combustion and emissions on climate change… but what about the effect on our health? Climate change poses a threat not only to the health of the planet, but also to humans.
The case studies evaluated in this report offer examples of mechanisms that can be used to restrict the production and consumption of unhealthy commodities, so that the health, air pollution and climate communities can learn from one another, using shared approaches and language. These case studies show that the connection with health is a strong argument to support sustainable change.
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This joint ECDC-European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) document aims to support Member States in determining a coordinated approach to reduce the risks related
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to the movement of people by air within and between the EU/EEA countries and the UK in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, noting that the impact of quarantine and testing is likely to vary according to levels of ongoing community transmission, and in the context of ECDC’s current advice that non-essential travel should be avoided during the end-of year festive period
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This report provides an overview of air pollution levels and associated health impacts in cities around the world. Since urban areas are often hotspots for poor air quality, city-level data can help
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to inform targeted efforts to curb urban air pollution and improve public health. This report draws on data from the Global Burden of Disease project and from peer-reviewed analyses led by Susan Anenberg of the George Washington University.
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There is increasing interest in understanding the role of air pollution as one of the greatest threats to human health worldwide. Nine of 10 individuals breathe
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air with polluted compounds that have a great impact on lung tissue. The nature of the relationship is complex, and new or updated data are constantly being reported in the literature. The goal of our review was to summarize the most important air pollutants and their impact on the main respiratory diseases (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, lung cancer, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, respiratory infections, bronchiectasis, tuberculosis) to reduce both short- and the long-term exposure consequences. We considered the most important air pollutants, including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, ozone, particulate matter and biomass smoke, and observed their impact on pulmonary pathologies. We focused on respiratory pathologies, because air pollution potentiates the increase in respiratory diseases, and the evidence that air pollutants have a detrimental effect is growing. It is imperative to constantly improve policy initiatives on air quality in both high- and low-income countries.
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Terminology used to describe the transmission of pathogens through the air varies across scientific disciplines, organizations and the general public. While this has been the case for decades, durin
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g the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, the terms ‘airborne’, ‘airborne transmission’ and ‘aerosol transmission’ were used in different ways by stakeholders in different scientific disciplines, which may have contributed to misleading information and confusion about how pathogens are transmitted in human populations.
This global technical consultation report brings together viewpoints from experts spanning a range of disciplines with the key objective of seeking consensus regarding the terminology used to describe the transmission of pathogens through the air that can potentially cause infection in humans.
This consultation aimed to identify terminology that could be understood and accepted by different technical disciplines. The agreed process was to develop a consensus document that could be endorsed by global agencies and entities. Despite the complex discussions and challenges, significant progress was made during the consultation process, particularly the consensus on a set of descriptors to describe how pathogens are transmitted through the air and the related modes of transmission. WHO recognizes the important areas where consensus was not achieved and will continue to address these areas in follow-up consultations.
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This policy brief explores the impact of air pollution on health and address the air quality issue in the response to noncommunicable diseases (NCD
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s). It also provides key actions that policy makers, NGOs and health professionals can take to ensure that every one can breathe clean air.
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Air pollution is a major environmental risk factor and contributor to chronic, noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). However, most public health approaches to
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NCD prevention focus on behavioural and biomedical risk factors, rather than environmental risk factors such as air pollution. This article discusses the implications of such a focus. It then outlines the opportunities for those in public health and environmental science to work together across three key areas to address air pollution, NCDs and climate change: (a) acknowledging the shared drivers, including corporate determinants; (b) taking a ‘co-benefits’ approach to NCD prevention; and (c) expanding prevention research and evaluation methods through investing in systems thinking and intersectoral, cross-disciplinary collaborations.
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