Developing technologies to assess long-term exposures of the Canadian population to air pollution: research leading to knowledge-transfer to reduce health effects

Epidemiological studies that juxtapose high quality information on health with that of exposures to ambient airpollutants have shown that air pollution adversely affects human health. It is now clear that there are healthimpairments at very low levels of air pollution. An improved understanding of these effects requires very largestudies that are capable of characterizing ambient exposures at small spatial scales. These studies are needed tomake appropriate public health actions. Indeed, the Canadian government is considering developing annualambient air pollution standards to address health effects from long-term exposures (annual to multi-year).There has been reluctance to develop these, owing partly to a lack of Canadian evidence of these effects, butalso due to a lack of high quality studies that link chronic diseases, such as lung cancer and cardiovasculardiseases, with levels of exposure at relatively small spatial scales. Traditional observations from fixed-sitemonitoring stations, which are used mainly for the purposes of ensuring compliance to regulations, provideonly sparse coverage of the country. In this proposal, we will develop technologies to assess the health impactsfrom long term exposure to air pollution throughout Canada by 1) exploiting recent advances in satelliteobservations and modeling to produce a complete national characterization of outdoor air pollutant exposures(i.e. PM2.5 and O3); 2) linking these exposures with two large Canadian population cohorts to quantify theimpact of long term air pollutant exposure on important adverse health outcomes (i.e., mortality, cancer); and3) applying this information to contribute to science-based ambient air quality regulations and decision making.These research activities would constitute an important body of evidence as to whether annual averagestandards should be developed in Canada.