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TEHRAN, Jun 1-Evidence continues to mount that airborne metal pollution produced by humans is more likely than naturally-occurring pollution to increase premature death risk, new research shows.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) -People who were exposed to high atmospheric concentrations of anthropogenic metals were more likely to die early, according to a study from the August issue of Environmental International. Anthropogenic metals come primarily from human activity versus metals that already exist in the atmosphere.
"There have been very few studies on the health effects of airborne metal pollutants, partly because of technical limitations, such as the lack of stations measuring air pollution. We thought that moss, because of its capacity to retain these metals, would be a useful tool for estimating the atmospheric metal exposure of people living in rural areas," Bénédicte Jacquemin, the Barcelona Institute for Global Health and study author, said in a news release.
To understand how atmospheric metal pollution impacts the risk of death, the researchers used wild moss samples to estimate the level of human exposure to airborne metal particles.
For the study, they used data from more than 11,300 people from the Gazel cohort who lived in rural areas across France. The Gazel cohort was launched in the 1970s to help facilitate epidemiological research on various diseases and multiple health-related factors.
The researchers built a mathematical model patterned after the geolocation data for the moss samples and the BRAMM laboratory analysis results. The samples came from regions all over France that sat far away from industrial areas. The analysis examined the moss for the presence of aluminium, arsenic, calcium, cadmium, chromium, copper, iron, mercury, sodium, nickel, lead, vanadium and zinc.
The metals they analyzed were placed into two groups: natural or anthropogenic. The results showed that people who were exposed to higher atmospheric concentrations of anthropogenic metals had a greater risk of death.
While cadmium, copper, mercury, lead and zinc are all naturally occurring metals, the researchers labeled them anthropogenic because human activity causes them to float in the air.
Globally, air pollution killed 8.8 million people each year, according to a March study.
"Our results indicate that the metals present in the airborne particulate matter could be a key component in the effects of air pollution on mortality," Jacquemin said. "It is important to bear in mind that the people we included in this study live in rural areas far from major urban and industrial centers and road networks. This means that they are very likely to be exposed to lower levels of air pollution than people living in urban environments, which gives us an idea of the seriousness of the health effects of air pollution, even at relatively low levels of exposure."
Source: upi
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