Monitoring ambient air quality for health impact assessment
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Doc #: 9
Title: Monitoring ambient air quality for health impact assessment | Document Link
Organization/Author: WHO
Type:
Year: 1999
Region: International
Observation Type:
Observation Needs:
Document Status: Unsubmitted, 2009/08/31
Parameters:
Description of Document: WHO; What are the features of monitoring networks that are needed to identify exposure.
Designing and planning a monitoring system
- Existing air monitoring systems often do not fully address the evaluation
of population exposure to toxic air pollutants and the assessment of the resulting health effects.
- The design of new monitoring programmes or refinement of existing
systems should therefore consider the need to use the data measured for the purpose of assessing the effects on population health.
- The pollutants studied, measurement time scales and locations
should be relevant to assessing human exposure and the expected health effects. Local conditions and pollution climates will determine the pollutants and methods to be given priority.
- Monitoring can have many objectives besides health impact assessment.
These objectives, together with resulting data quality objectives, need to be clearly defined when monitoring systems are designed or updated.
- Monitoring is only one of a range of tools for assessing air quality;
monitoring, emission inventories and predictive models are complementary components in an integrated approach to assessing exposure and health effects.
