Found 9759 publications. Showing page 227 of 391:
Health Risk Assessment of Air Pollution and the Impact of the New WHO Guidelines
Air pollution is a major cause of premature death and disease and is the single largest environmental health risk in Europe. Heart disease and stroke are the most common reasons for premature deaths attributable to air pollution, followed by lung diseases and lung cancer.
The health risk assessment methodology assumptions have been recently adapted to follow the recommendations by the World Health Organisation (WHO), released in 2021. The new global air quality guidelines by WHO provide up-to-date health-based guideline levels for major health-damaging air pollutants and new recommendations for assessing the risk of exposure to air pollution.
This report estimates the health risk related to air pollution in 2020 based on the latest methodology. The estimates consider the number of premature deaths and years of life lost related to exposure to fine particulate matter, ozone and nitrogen dioxide, both for the 27 Member States of the European Union and for additional 14 European countries (Albania, Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iceland, Kosovo, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, San Marino, Serbia, Switzerland, and Türkiye).
A sensitivity analysis to the changes in concentration-response functions and counterfactual concentrations is performed to understand the impact of such changes on the mortality outcome estimates. The sensitivity analysis included both old and new health risk methodology assumptions but also the recommendation from the ELAPSE study on the concentration response functions. The ELAPSE project includes some of the most recent studies on the health effects at low air pollution levels by examining associations between exposures to relatively low levels of air pollution across Europe, including levels below the current EU standards.
The results for 2020 show that the largest health risks are estimated for the countries with the largest populations. However, in relative terms, when considering e.g., years of life lost per 100 000 inhabitants, the largest relative risks are observed in central and eastern European countries for PM2.5, in central and southern European countries for NO2, and south and eastern European for O3. The lowest impact is found for the northern and north-western parts of Europe, where the concentrations are lowest. The number of premature deaths attributed to air pollution in 2020 compared to 2019, increased for PM2.5 and decreased for NO2 and O3. Apart from the changes in concentrations and demographics, the COVID-19 pandemics seems to also have an influence on these changes. For PM2.5, the reduction in concentrations were counteracted by the excess of deaths due to the pandemics. In the case of NO2, the reduction in concentrations was more pronounced as a result of the lockdown measures and the drastic reduction in traffic and its impact in reducing mortality was bigger than the increasing impact of excess of deaths due to COVID-19.
Changing assumptions on concentration-response functions and counterfactual concentrations have implications for estimating mortality health outcomes. The sensitivity analysis shows that it is not straightforward to assess which assumptions estimates the highest health impacts when both factors change. In this case, the final outcome will depend on the concentration at the grid-cell level. The latest assumptions are expected to reduce the health outcomes for PM2.5 and increase for NO2 and O3, when compared to the previous one. When aggregated to all countries, the health outcomes are reduced by over 40 % for PM2.5 and increased by 50 % and 30 % for NO2 and O3, respectively, in 2020. However, this change varies across countries depending on the concentration level the population in the individual countries is exposed to.
ETC/HE
2022
2013
Health implications of HBCD - results of an expert elicitation. NILU OR, 80/2010
2010
Health impacts of PM
Residential wood combustion (RWC) is one of the largest sources of fine particles (PM2.5) in the Nordic cities. The current study aims to calculate the related health effects in four studied city areas in Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark.
BioMed Central (BMC)
2022
Health impacts and air pollution - An exploration of factors influencing estimates of air pollution impact upon the health of European citizens. ETC/ACC Technical Paper, 2008/13
2008
2015
2009
Health and Exposure to VOCs From Pinewood in Indoor Environments
Frontiers Media S.A.
2019
The contaminant situation in the Norwegian-Russian border has caused concern for several decades and considerable amount of data has been gathered during the Pasvik programme (Stebel et al., 2007; Pasvik programme, 2008) for the environmental pollution, but not in this extent for food safety and potential human health risks in this region. Through the compiling of the available literature the authors of this report have identified a number of issues that need further attention.
2013
2021
2022
Hazard identification and safety assessment of the huge variety of nanomaterials (NMs), calls for robust and validated toxicity screening tests in combination with cheminformatics approaches to identify factors that can drive toxicity. Cytotoxicity and genotoxicity of seventeen JRC repository NMs, derived from titanium dioxide, zinc oxide, silver and silica, were tested in vitro using human lung alveolar epithelial cells A549. Cytotoxicity was assessed with the AlamarBlue (AB) and colony forming efficiency (CFE) assays, and genotoxicity by the enzyme-linked version of the comet assay. Nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA) was used to measure size of the NMs in stock and in cell culture medium at different time points. Categorization and ranking of cytotoxic and genotoxic potential were performed (EU-NanoREG2 project approach). Descriptors for prediction of NMs toxicity were identified by quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) analysis. Our results showed that ZnO NMs (NM-110 and NM-111), and Ag NMs (NM-300K and NM-302) were cytotoxic, while the TiO2 and SiO2 NMs were non-cytotoxic. Regarding genotoxicity, TiO2 NM-100, ZnO NM-110, SiO2 NM-203 and Ag NM-300K were categorized as positive. Cheminformatics modeling identified electron properties and overall chemical reactivity as important descriptors for cytotoxic potential, HOMO-LUMO energy parameter, ionization potential, pristine size for the NMs´ genotoxic potential, and presence of surface coating as descriptor for induction of DNA oxidized base lesions.
Elsevier
2022
Enniatins (ENNs) and beauvericin (BEA) are cyclic hexadepsipeptide fungal metabolites which have demonstrated antibiotic, antimycotic, and insecticidal activities. The substantial toxic potentials of these mycotoxins are associated with their ionophoric molecular properties and relatively high lipophilicities. ENNs occur extensively in grain and grain-derived products and are considered a food safety issue by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The tolerable daily intake and maximum levels for ENNs in humans and animals remain unestablished due to key toxicological and toxicokinetic data gaps, preventing full risk assessment. Aiming to find critical data gaps impeding hazard characterization and risk evaluation, this review presents a comprehensive summary of the existing information from in vitro and in vivo studies on toxicokinetic characteristics and cytotoxic, genotoxic, immunotoxic, endocrine, reproductive and developmental effects of the most prevalent ENN analogues (ENN A, A1, B, B1) and BEA. The missing information identified showed that additional studies on ENNs and BEA have to be performed before sufficient data for an in-depth hazard characterisation of these mycotoxins become available.
Springer
2025
Background
Hazard and risk assessment of nanomaterials (NMs) face challenges due to, among others, the numerous existing nanoforms, discordant data and conflicting results found in the literature, and specific challenges in the application of strategies such as grouping and read-across, emphasizing the need for New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) to support Next Generation Risk Assessment (NGRA). Here these challenges are addressed in a study that couples physico-chemical characterization with in vitro investigations and in silico similarity analyses for nine nanoforms, having different chemical composition, sizes, aggregation states and shapes. For cytotoxicity assessment, three methods (Alamar Blue, Colony Forming Efficiency, and Electric Cell-Substrate Impedance Sensing) are applied in a cross-validation approach to support NAMs implementation into NGRA.
Results
The results highlight the role of physico-chemical properties in eliciting biological responses. Uptake studies reveal distinct cellular morphological changes. The cytotoxicity assessment shows varying responses among NMs, consistent among the three methods used, while only one nanoform gave a positive response in the genotoxicity assessment performed by comet assay.
Conclusions
The study highlights the potential of in silico models to effectively identify biologically active nanoforms based on their physico-chemical properties, reinforcing previous knowledge on the relevance of certain properties, such as aspect ratio. The potential of implementing in vitro methods into NGRA is underlined, cross-validating three cytotoxicity assessment methods, and showcasing their strength in terms of sensitivity and suitability for the testing of NMs.
BioMed Central (BMC)
2024
2022
The movement towards an animal-free testing approach for risk assessment represents a key paradigm shift in toxicology. Risk assessment of engineered and anthropogenic nanoscale materials (NM) is dependent on reliable hazard characterization, which requires validated test methods and models, and increasingly on mechanistic insights into the mode of action. The properties that make NMs so advantageous for a wide range of commercial and industrial applications also pose a challenge when it comes to safety testing under in vitro and in chemico experimental settings. Their large reactive surface area makes NMs prone to interactions with assay reagents, readout signals, or intermediate steps of many test assays, leading to the potential for biased results and data inconsistencies, collectively referred to as interferences. Therefore, methods and protocols developed and validated for conventional chemicals often require adaptation and checking for reliability in NMs' toxicity assessment. This review presents the collected scientific knowledge on NMs-induced interferences for the most common in vitro toxicity assays and methods related to cytotoxicity, oxidative stress and inflammatory response evaluation. Our analysis of existing scientific literature showed that the challenge of NMs-induced interference was not explicitly addressed in more than 90% of the papers published up to 2014 reporting the safety and toxicity of NMs. In later years, increasing number of studies tackled the interference challenge in toxicity testing of NMs, which initiated exhaustive work on standardization and validation of existing regulatory-relevant in vitro test protocols and guidelines. Due to the specificity of the different NMs and the range of ways they can potentially interfere with in vitro assays, interference and fit-for purpose controls should be included for each NM type and method applied, unless label-free assays are selected. Here, we provide a decision tree to guide researchers on how to design experiments to avoid interferences during in vitro testing by taking appropriate mitigation actions and how to include proper interference controls in their experimental design where complete avoidance is not possible. The application of this decision tree will improve the reliability, comparability and reusability of in vitro toxicity data on engineered NMs or ENMs, increasing the relevance of in silico hazard data for use in risk assessment and in science-based risk governance of NMs. The approach is applicable more broadly also, to advanced materials and to hazard assessment of anthropogenic nanoscale materials such as microplastic and tyre-wear particles.
Elsevier
2024
2025
2025
2022