LIFE MED-HISS: Mediterranean Health Interview Surveys Studies: long term exposure to air pollution and health surveillance

Duration

2012

Coordinator

Ennio Cadum (AGENZIA REGIONALE PER LA PROTEZIONE AMBIENTALE DEL PIEMONTE (ARPAP), ITALY)

Funded by

European Commission (LIFE program)

MED-HISS project aims at contributing to the updating and development of

European Union environmental policy and legislation, in term of adverse

health effect of air pollution.

The current understanding of the association between long-term exposure to

air pollution and adverse health effect is based on cohort studies from USA,

Canada, Japan, China.

In recent years, new studies have been conducted in Europe, but often with

restrictions on age of cohort recruited, pollutant studied, and with poor

geographical variability (only urban areas). Health Impact Assessment (HIA)

previously done on European population could have been biased due to the

application to European population of risks estimated from northern American

cohorts, exposed to different particulate chemical composition as well as

with different population characteristics.

MED-HISS aims to contribute to consolidate the knowledge base for the

development, assessment, monitoring and evaluation of environmental policy

and legislation, by setting up a low-cost European surveillance system of

long term effects of air pollution based on retrospective cohorts recruited

using National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data already available.

Cohorts will be followed-up for mortality and morbidity, and to each subject

will be assigned the exposure to air pollution (PM10, PM2.5, Nox, NO2, O3),

derived from national dispersion models.

MED-HISS is a demonstration project, and involves four European countries

(Spain, France, Italy, Slovenia), in order to guarantee to the EU a source

of information for HIA based on direct measurements.

MED-HISS aim is to assess the feasibility of the adopted approach in other

European countries to create a European cohort database of individual

characteristic and air pollution data exposure useful also for future

studies on other environmental issues, with a specific attention to exposure

assessment.

Project website