Health Assessment Aspects of Risk- and Results-Based Multipollutant Air Quality Management

Abstract

Knowledge of the health impacts of air contaminants is key to both the development of risk-based multipollutant air quality management strategies and the evaluation of their success in reducing the health burden of air pollution. This chapter summarizes the present ability of health sciences researchers to produce evidence useful for informing the development of multipollutant air quality management and assessing the resulting health benefits, the advances in knowledge and research strategies that will be required to substantially advance that ability, and the progress we can reasonably expect over the next decade. The chapter deals with key elements of the risk assessment framework described in Chap. 4, especially assessing exposure, identifying causal pollutants and combinations, and determining exposure-response relationships (potency factors). It concludes that continued progress toward supporting multipollutant air quality management will occur in incremental steps as we become able to integrate increasing numbers of individual pollutants, pollutant groupings, and sources, and their corresponding health risks. Progress towards developing multipollutant air quality management strategies and accounting for their success will depend upon how well we understand the links between various pollutants and health, and how confidently we can measure pollutant-related changes in the health impacts we seek to reduce.