Rising levels of air pollution throughout the globe mean rising number of trips to the emergency room for children and adults who suffer from asthma. The links between exposure to air pollutants and health are a research specialty of Associate Professor Susan Anenberg, who spoke at a recent seminar put on by the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health (EOH) at GW’s Milken Institute School of Public Health.
As Anenberg explained at her seminar, "The Global Burden of Ambient Air pollution on Asthma," exposure to air pollution in the form of ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5), ozone, and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is associated with worsening the symptoms of asthma. Approximately 358 million people worldwide have asthma, and that number is projected to increase in the future. Anenberg told attendees about some of her current research investigating how exposure to ambient air pollution impacts the number of visits by asthmatics to the emergency room visits globally, particularly in China and India.
Ambient air pollution could be responsible a significant portion of asthma exacerbation globally, Anenberg’s research shows. She argues that a major benefit of air pollution mitigation would be to address the growing global asthma burden. Other research she and her collaborators have published recently suggests that exposure to outdoor ozone pollution is responsible for substantially more deaths than previously understood, and that diesel vehicle emissions, particularly those from on-road heavy-duty diesel trucks, were associated with 38,000 premature deaths in 2015, globally.
As a researcher, Anenberg helped make a name for herself by finding ways to use atmospheric models and satellite measurements of air pollution in health assessments.
After the seminar, Alex Lindahl, a second-year MPH student enrolled in the department’s Environmental Health Science and Policy program, asked Anenberg about what inspired her to look beyond the ground-based pollution monitoring data that was conventionally used in studies analyzing the impact of exposure to air pollutants on health.
Up until a decade ago, “the health impact analysis of air pollution was mainly limited to areas where we had ground-based monitoring,” Anenberg explains in her response. “There are now growing numbers of monitoring networks throughout the world, but there are still many parts of the world that are not covered by ground-based air monitoring,” she says.
You can listen to the rest of Anenberg’s answer in this 1:22 video on the EOH Department’s YouTube Channel.
The department features talks by one or two experts each month at lunchtime events, and these seminars are one of the ways our students learn about current EOH topics.