The health effects of air pollution in Asian megacities
Globally air pollution is believed to be responsible for several million premature deaths every single year. Many megacities see the continuous exposure of many millions of people to extremely high levels of air pollution, and represent a priority for interventions to reduce pollution, exposure or the associated health effects.
Research Methods and Objectives
Our group is involved in two large programmes of research to study the health effects of air pollution in meagacities in China and India;
The APIC-ESTEE (Air Pollution Impacts on Cardiopulmonary Disease in Beijing: An integrated study of Exposure Science, Toxicogenomics and Environmental Epidemiology) project will investigate the effects of air pollution in Beijing using epidemiological approaches, panel studies with simultaneous measurement of air pollution and health parameters, and complementary toxicology studies. The project is funded by NERC, MRC & the Newton Fund in the UK, and the National Science Foundation of China. The work is lead by Dr Miranda Loh (Institute of Occupational Medicine, UK) and Prof Zhiwei Sun (CCMU, Beijing).
The DAPHNE (Delhi Air Pollution: Health aNd Effects) project will investigate the effects of air pollution in Delhi using epidemiological approaches and small panel studies in adolescents and pregnant mothers. The project is funded by NERC, MRC and the Newton Fund in the UK, and Ministry of Earth Sciences and Department of Biotechnology in India. The work is lead by DK Arvind (Informatics, University of Edinburgh) and Prof Kalpana Balakrishnan (SRU, Chennai). [Delhi image courtesy of Miranda Loh].
Principal Investigator, Co-Investigators, Other researchers
APIC (UK), Miranda Loh (IOM), Mark Miller, Ruth Doherty (Geosciences), Mat Heal (Chemistry), Chun Lin (Chemistry), Paul Wilkinson (LSHTM), John Cherrie (IOM), Fintan Hurley (IOM), Stefan Reis (CEH), DAPHNE (UK), DK Arvind (Informatics), Darius Fischer (Informatics), Anoop Shah, Paul Cullinan (ICL), Jennifer Quint (ICL), Fan Chung (ICL)