Publications

This edition of Update reports on HEI's presentation of GBD MAPS results at a major Chinese air pollution meeting; HEI's Annual Conference in Denver in May; two new HEI research reports on the effects of air pollution on birth and pregnancy outcomes; a meeting of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies at which HEI shared research results with diverse experts and regulators; and HEI's participation at a EPA Clean Air Act Advisory Committee meeting in June.

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 is Part 3 of HEI Research Report 183, Development of Statistical Methods for Multipollutant Research. It describes a study to develop and apply statistical methods to analyze the effects of multipollutant exposures on health, expanding beyond the two-pollutant approaches used in many studies to date. HEI funded three innovative studies in recent years to improve the tools for analyzing complex multipollutant exposures. In this last report from these studies, John Molitor and colleagues describe a Bayesian framework to identify spatial clusters of air pollution exposures — and other covariates such as socioeconomic status — and estimated pregnancy outcomes associated with those clusters, using a data set for Los Angeles county. 

The 2015 Annual Report – Vision 2020 - describes HEI’s partnership with scientists, government, industry, and the environmental community to provide high-quality, impartial, and relevant science to inform public policy decisions about air quality and public health. The report highlights the vision underlying HEI’s Strategic Plan 2015-2020 and outlines HEI’s contributions in the past year to important questions.