Publications

The National Morbidity, Mortality, and Air Pollution Study (NMMAPS) was designed to select multiple locations based on the specific criteria of population size and availability of PM₁₀ data from the US Environmental Protection Agency's Aerometric Information Retrieval System (AIRS) database, and to apply the same statistical procedures to all locations. Dr Jonathan Samet and his colleagues Johns Hopkins University conducted a time-series study of mortality effects in large US cities representing various levels of PM₁₀ and gaseous pollutants.

The Phase I.B Report of the Particle Epidemiology Evaluation Project. The Health Effects Institute began the Particle Epidemiology Evaluation Project in 1994 to evaluate the emerging epidemiologic evidence of a relation between particulate air pollution and daily mortality. In Phase I.B, Drs. Jonathan M. Samet and Scott L. Zeger and their colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health (1) compared approaches for controlling the effects of weather variables when analyzing the connection between air pollution and daily mortality, primarily focusing on Synoptic Weather Categories, an approach newly proposed by Dr. Laurence S. Kalkstein of the University of Delaware; and (2) evaluated the association between particulate air pollution and daily mortality in the Philadelphia metropolitan area using statistical models that included data for five pollutants regulated under the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 (referred to as criteria pollutants).

The Phase I.A Report of the Particle Epidemiology Evaluation Project. The Health Effects Institute began the Particle Epidemiology Evaluation Project in 1994 to evaluate the emerging epidemiologic evidence of a relation between particulate air pollution and daily mortality. In Phase I.A, Drs. Jonathan M. Samet and Scott L. Zeger and their colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health (1) reconstructed from original sources the data set for Philadelphia used in earlier studies and confirmed previous numerical results from analyzing these data; (2) developed an analytic approach (including new statistical methods) based on the Philadelphia data set; and (3) applied this approach to data sets for six locations: Philadelphia; Utah Valley; St. Louis, MO; Eastern Tennessee; Birmingham, AL; and Santa Clara County, CA.

This document contains two reports by Drs. McCool and Samet and their colleagues who were funded to develop and test methods for measuring ventilation in freely mobile subjects at home or at work. Drs. Dennis McCool and Domyung Paek at the Memorial Hospital in Rhode Island measured ventilation with a body surface displacement (BSD) model. Each subject wore wide elastic bands containing coated wire coils around the chest and abdomen and had special magnets affixed to the breastbone and navel, which yielded data about their breathing patterns, breath frequency, and ventilation. In the second study, Dr. Jonathan Samet and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University wanted to develop methods for estimating ventilation from heart rate for future epidemiologic studies. They used the Heartwatch, a portable, commercial device combining a small transmitter worn on the subject's chest with a wristwatch-style receiver that records heart rate.