A comparison of health impacts assessment for PM10 during two successive years in the ambient air of Kermanshah, Iran

Kermanshah as fairly important industrial city suffered from air pollution specially dust storm during the recent decade. The main purpose of this study was to compare quantitatively the health impacts of PM10 on citizens of Kermanshah city during two successive years. The hourly data of PM10 was taken from Kermanshah Environmental Protection Agency (KEPA) which was measured by Beta attenuation method. We used a health effect model for quantification which was based on baseline incidence (BI), relative risk (RR) and attributable proportion (AP). Our findings showed that 7.6, 11, 15.1, 13.5 and 7.6 percent of total mortality (TM), cardiovascular mortality (CM), respiratory mortality (RM), hospital admission respiratory disease (HARD) and hospital admission cardiovascular disease (HACD) were attributable to short term exposure to PM10, respectively in 2011. With regarding to two years in view of short term health effects, we observed that 20 percent reduction occurred in 2012 compared with 2011. We also concluded that 48 and 12 percent of all health impacts were attributed to occurrence of Middle East Dust (MED) storms during 2011 and 2012, respectively.