Research Progress on Urban Air Quality Health Risk Assessment

At present,air pollution draws attention of many researchers and officials from all countries to the latent impacts to human health in the world,along with the development of industrialization and urbanization.Study focus is to assess health effects of exposure to pollutants.Recently health risk assessment of air pollution is being developed at home and abroad.The full risk assessment process includes identification of pollutant concentration,exposure assessment,dose and effect assessment and expression of human health risk.The authors introduce research progress in urban air quality simulation,human exposure,air pollutant toxicology and health effect,and GIS operation in health risk assessment in recent years.Having analysed existing researches,the authors find some research limits,including: 1.Research scale are restricted to small regions,and data from limit inspect stations can't assess broad regions,such as megapolis;2.Applied methods usually are qualitative although some are semi-quantitative assessment on the basis of WHO air quality health effect standard;3.Indexes of human effect mainly are morbidity and mortality,and seldom research touches on health risk of exposed population;4.Some researches focus on conventional pollutants health effect in short term,and little involve comparatively sensitive traffic pollutant health effect.In order to serve population,future research should concentrate on simulating microscopic urban air quality,structuring quantitative assessment based on exposure-dose relationship and developing long-term pollutant health effect models according to actually absorbed dose.