APHEIS : Air pollution and health - a European information system
Résumé
APHEIS aims to create an epidemiological surveillance system for health impact assessment (HIA) of air pollution in Europe.
During the first year of the programme, the main objective was to determine and agree on the most appropriate indicators and on the best way to analyse them. To achieve this, experts from five advisory groups, in the fields of public health, air pollution exposure assessment, epidemiology, statistics and health impact assessment, drafted guidelines which defined the environmental and health indicators to be collected, processed and analysed by the APHEIS centres.
The advisory groups also provided general recommendations that stressed the need to keep the epidemiological surveillance system as simple and flexible as possible and the need to adapt the organisational aspects to the particular context of each centre. The advisory groups also stressed that: a) It is essential to ensure the comparability of all measurements made by all APHEIS centres; b) Uncertainties should be discussed thoroughly at each step in the calculations needed for HIA; c) When it is pertinent and available, data provided by European databases, such as AIRBASE, EUROAIRNET, EAN and EUROSTAT should be used.
Finally, the statistics advisory group examined important research questions that have direct implications for epidemiological surveillance and HIA and will require further development.
APHEIS’ second objective during its first year was to identify those institutes in the participating centres best able to implement the epidemiological surveillance system. To do so, the programme had to go through two stages. The first stage, the local set-up description, covered aspects relating to local set-up conditions considered important to implement an information system on air pollution and health. The second stage, compliance with guidelines, dealt with measuring each participating centre’s compliance with the criteria formulated in each of the five specific areas of the guidelines.
To achieve this aim, two specific questionnaires were sent to each centre to assess its ability to implement the surveillance system. Results showed that: a) Most centres comply with the guidelines, indicating the ability of each local centre to generate basic, standardised reports on a periodic basis; b) Some centres can provide advanced reports on specific issues on a periodic basis.
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