Accountability

HEI Research Report 187 was funded as part of HEI’s Accountability research program, aimed at understanding whether actions to improve air quality have resulted in improved health outcomes. Corwin M. Zigler and his colleagues used existing and newly developed statistical methods to assess whether an intervention was causally related to changes in pollutant levels or health outcomes, and applied their methods in two well-developed case studies: effects of air quality interventions to reduce PM₁₀ concentrations in nonattainment areas and the impact of installation of scrubber technologies on emissions from coal-fired power plants.

This report revisits an earlier study of the air pollution and health impacts of a coal ban in Dublin, Ireland, and then extends the analysis to coal bans in 11 additional Irish cities. Dr. Douglas W. Dockery of the Harvard School of Public Health and colleagues evaluated changes in black smoke and sulfur dioxide concentrations for the 5 years before and after the coal bans and examined how those changes related to mortality and hospitalization rates in the counties affected by the bans, as compared with other counties where coal bans were not implemented. They also included in their analysis other trends in health and social factors that were occurring at the same time.

This report describes a study to evaluate a series of aggressive policies intended to reduce local and regional emissions in the greater Beijing metropolitan area leading up to and during the 2008 Olympics. Dr. Junfeng (Jim) Zhang of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and colleagues evaluated the impact of the likely changes in air pollution levels on cardiovascular responses in 125 healthy young participants before, during, and after the Beijing Olympics. The investigators used mixed models and time-series methods to analyze associations between pollutant levels and biomarkers.