AAAR 33rd Annual Conference
October 20 - October 24, 2014
Rosen Shingle Creek
Orlando, Florida, USA
Abstract View
Estimating the Public Health Impacts of Ultrafine Particulate Matter in the San Francisco Bay Area
CUONG TRAN, Saffet Tanrikulu, David Fairley, Su-tzai Soong, Yiqin Jia, Jeffery Matsuoka, Eric Stevenson, Henry Hilken, Bay Area Air Quality Management District
Abstract Number: 603 Working Group: Linking Aerosols with Public Health in a Changing World
Abstract Ultrafine particulate matter (UFPM) is currently an unregulated pollutant, but has harmful effects on human health. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) has been studying UFPM with the goal of reducing its emissions, ambient levels and health impacts in the Bay Area. The key components of that study include continuous ambient monitoring since 2012, data analysis, emissions inventory development, air quality simulation, and estimation of exposure and health burdens. Here, we summarize the preliminary estimation of the public health burdens and associated monetary costs of UFPM for the San Francisco Bay Area. To our knowledge, this is the first study to estimate regional health impacts of UFPM.
The BAAQMD, in collaboration with the California EPA’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), has compiled health impact functions for UFPM from an extensive literature review. We incorporated them into the US EPA’s BenMAP model to analyze the health burdens of UFPM. To estimate-region wide UFPM levels, we utilized co-located measurements of UFPM and other species at four air monitoring stations. UFPM correlated reasonably well with NO2; therefore, we estimated region-wide ambient UFPM levels by applying correlations between UFPM and NO2, derived from the simultaneous measurements of both pollutants, to simulated NO2 concentrations. We used detailed population data from the 2010 US Census with BenMAP to estimate exposure and total incidences of premature mortality, asthma-related emergency room visits (ERV), respiratory hospitalizations, and cardiovascular hospitalizations.
Our analysis shows 800 excess mortalities per year and about $300M in direct costs of illness (COI) for UFPM. We compared these findings to previous results for PM2.5, which indicated 1700 premature deaths and $1B COI per year in the Bay Area. There were also spatial and seasonality differences between these pollutants, implying that different approaches to mitigating their impacts are needed.