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FredericaP. Perera, Ph.D. At the time of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, there were few air pollution monitoring sites in areas of New York City exposed to the resulting pollution. Additional air monitoring equipment close to or within the rescue and recovery site were installed with a few weeks of the incident. However, it isn't possible to estimate individual exposures to air pollution because of limitations in timing, and the distribution and scope of monitoring following September 11, 2001. To overcome this limitation, NIEHS-supported researchers at the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health examined the ability of a newly developed perceived air pollution scale and a modeled air pollution scale derived from it for predicting previously observed birth outcomes in pregnant women enrolled in a study just after September 11th. The women reported where they lived and worked in the four weeks following the collapse of the towers. They also provided information on a four point scale relating to the severity of air pollution in these locations. The researchers found that both the perceived air pollution scale and the modeled scale were highly correlated with distance from the World Trade Center site. They also found that the relationships of several birth outcomes to proximity to the site were apparent when the modeled values were used as the measure of exposure to air pollution. The team concludes that modeled air pollution values derived from perceived values may be useful in identifying high-risk areas and to predict health outcomes when traditional air pollution monitoring is not available. These results support prior findings of adverse effects on birth outcomes from the September 11th attacks. Citation: Lederman SA, Becker M, Sheets S, Stein J, Tang D, Weiss L, Perera FP. Modeling exposure to air pollution from the WTC disaster based on reports of perceived air pollution. Risk Anal. 2008 Apr;28(2):287-301. |
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