This study provides some evidence that specific components of the particle mixture for air pollutants may be relevant to specific diseases. Interpretation should be cautious, however, in particular because exposures were based upon data from a single centrally located monitoring site. There is a need for replication with more comprehensive exposure data, both in London and elsewhere.

No abstract

Air pollution has been recognized as a threat to human health since the time of Hippocrates, ca 400 BC. Successive written accounts of air pollution occur in different countries through the following two millennia until measurements, from the eighteenth century onwards, show the growing scale of poor air quality in urban centres and close to industry, and the chemical characteristics of the gases and particulate matter. The industrial revolution accelerated both the magnitude of emissions of the primary pollutants and the geographical spread of contributing countries as highly polluted cities became the defining issue, culminating with the great smog of London in 1952. Europe and North America dominated emissions and suffered the majority of adverse effects until the latter decades of the twentieth century, by which time the transboundary issues of acid rain, forest decline and ground-level ozone became the main environmental and political air quality issues. As controls on emissions of sulfur and nitrogen oxides (SO 2 and NO x ) began to take effect in Europe and North America, emissions in East and South Asia grew strongly and dominated global emissions by the early years of the twenty-first century. The effects of air quality on human health had also returned to the top of the priorities by 2000 as new epidemiological evidence emerged. By this time, extensive networks of surface measurements and satellite remote sensing provided global measurements of both primary and secondary pollutants. Global emissions of SO 2 and NO x peaked, respectively, in ca 1990 and 2018 and have since declined to 2020 as a result of widespread emission controls. By contrast, with a lack of actions to abate ammonia, global emissions have continued to grow. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Air quality, past present and future’.

Research confirming the detrimental impact poor ambient air quality and episodes of abnormally high pollutants has on public health, plus differential susceptibility, calls for improved understanding of this complex topic among all walks of society. The public and particularly, vulnerable groups, should be aware of their quality of air, enabling action to be taken in the event of increased pollution. Policy makers must have a sound awareness of current air quality and future trends, to identify issues, guide policies and monitor their effectiveness. These attitudes are dependent upon air pollution monitoring, forecasting and reporting, serving all interested parties. Apart from the underlying national regulatory obligation a country has in reporting air quality information, data output serves several purposes. This review focuses on provision of real-time data and advanced warnings of potentially health-damaging events, in the form of national air quality indices and proactive alert services. Some of the challenges associated with designing these systems include technical issues associated with the complexity of air pollution and its science. These include inability to provide precise exposure concentrations or guidance on long-term/cumulative exposures or effects from pollutant combinations. Other issues relate to the degree to which people are aware and positively respond to these services. Looking to the future, mobile devices such as cellular phones, equipped with sensing applications have potential to provide dynamic, temporally and spatially precise exposure measures for the mass population. The ultimate aim should be to empower people to modify behaviour-for example, when to increase medication, the route/mode of transport taken to school or work or the appropriate time to pursue outdoor activities-in a way that protects their health as well as the quality of the air they breathe.

Abstract. Positive matrix factorisation (PMF) analysis was applied to PM10 chemical composition and particle number size distribution (NSD) data measured at an urban background site (North Kensington) in London, UK, for the whole of 2011 and 2012. The PMF analyses for these 2 years revealed six and four factors respectively which described seven sources or aerosol types. These included nucleation, traffic, urban background, secondary, fuel oil, marine and non-exhaust/crustal sources. Urban background, secondary and traffic sources were identified by both the chemical composition and particle NSD analysis, but a nucleation source was identified only from the particle NSD data set. Analysis of the PM10 chemical composition data set revealed fuel oil, marine, non-exhaust traffic/crustal sources which were not identified from the NSD data. The two methods appear to be complementary, as the analysis of the PM10 chemical composition data is able to distinguish components contributing largely to particle mass, whereas the number particle size distribution data set – although limited to detecting sources of particles below the diameter upper limit of the SMPS (604 nm) – is more effective for identifying components making an appreciable contribution to particle number. Analysis was also conducted on the combined chemical composition and NSD data set, revealing five factors representing urban background, nucleation, secondary, aged marine and traffic sources. However, the combined analysis appears not to offer any additional power to discriminate sources above that of the aggregate of the two separate PMF analyses. Day-of-the-week and month-of-the-year associations of the factors proved consistent with their assignment to source categories, and bivariate polar plots which examined the wind directional and wind speed association of the different factors also proved highly consistent with their inferred sources. Source attribution according to the air mass back trajectory showed, as expected, higher concentrations from a number of source types in air with continental origins. However, when these were weighted according to their frequency of occurrence, air with maritime origins made a greater contribution to annual mean concentrations.