2nd Edition of Integrated Human Exposure to Air Pollution

Dear Colleagues,

Along with climate change, air pollution is one of the major environmental problems that currently affects everyone in the world. The World Health Organization indicates that air pollution is estimated to cause 7 million premature deaths and results in the decrease in healthy years of life for millions more. Nowadays, the burden of disease attributable to air pollution is considered to be similar to that of other major global health risks, such as an unhealthy diet and tobacco smoking.

To decrease the negative impact of the human exposure to air pollution on citizens’ health and welfare, it is crucial to understand and create strategies and mitigation measures for its control. However, citizen exposure to air pollutants is typically based only on concentrations of pollutants monitored by the air quality monitoring stations of national environmental agencies. These monitoring stations focus on outdoor air quality and the majority are located in urban centers.

This approach also fails to account for all components of exposure, since people spend a great amount of their time indoors and have different time-activity patterns and, moreover, there is also high variability in ambient air pollutant concentrations within a city.

Therefore, human exposure during a full day cannot be reflected only by outdoor exposure and should consider all microenvironments where individuals spend their time (e.g., home, workplace, transport, leisure, and others) and the time spent in them. The characterization of indoor and outdoor environments is essential to assess the integrated human exposure to air pollutants.

The need to increase the knowledge in this field led us to establish this Special Issue of IJERPH dedicated to integrated human exposure to air pollutants. Taking into account the great interest from researchers from all around the world that this Special Issue generated in its first edition, we believe that a second edition will be useful for gathering additional valuable information and research works that have since been conducted on this important topic.

With this second edition of the Special Issue IHETAP, we invite colleagues to contribute with research targeting the human exposure in different microenvironments, individual exposures under specific conditions and activities, and methodologies to understand pollution sources and their impact on indoor and ambient air quality, with the main aim of developing the most effective mitigation measures to decrease human exposure and protect public health.

Dr. Nuno Canha
Dr. Marta Almeida
Dr. Evangelia Diapouli
Guest Editors

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