Nearly 60% of U.S. children live in counties with PM2.5 concentrations above air quality standards. Understanding the relationship between ambient air pollution exposure and health outcomes informs actions to reduce exposure and disease risk.

Ambient air pollution is a major health risk globally. To reduce adverse health effects on days when air pollution is high, government agencies worldwide have implemented air quality alert programmes. Despite their widespread use, little is known about whether these programmes produce any observable public-health benefits. We assessed the effectiveness of such programmes using a quasi-experimental approach.

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Many policy interventions intended to benefit public health can only be evaluated as so-called natural experiments, because implementation is not controlled by researchers seeking to assess effectiveness. Such assessments can be complicated by non-comparability between people affected and not affected by the intervention. Various quasi-experimental designs have been proposed to address this problem of non-comparability, one being the regression discontinuity design, which has had little use in public health.

Few large multicity studies have been conducted in developing countries to address the acute health effects of atmospheric ozone pollution. The researchers explored the associations between ozone and daily cause-specific mortality in China.

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Urban air quality in most megacities has been found to be critical and Kolkata Metropolitan City is no exception to this. An analysis of ambient air quality in Kolkata was done by applying the Exceedance Factor (EF) method, where the presence of listed pollutants’ (RPM, SPM, NO2, and SO2) annual average concentration are classified into four different categories; namely critical, high, moderate, and low pollution.

This paper reviews the effectiveness of traffic management strategies (TMS) for mitigating emissions, ambient concentrations, human exposure, and health effects of traffic-related air pollution in urban areas. The objective is to summarize the evidence base for a range of moderate-scale strategies broadly relevant to municipal and regional government decision-making.

High levels of air pollution from transport systems in urban India pose a severe threat to public health. While long-term challenges remain to curtail pollution sources, immediate measures must be taken to minimise risks to exposed populations.

Insulin resistance (IR) is present long before the onset of type 2 diabetes and results not only from inherited and lifestyle factors but likely also from environmental conditions. We investigated the association between modelled long-term exposure to air pollution at residence and biomarkers related to IR, subclinical inflammation and adipokines.

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