Prevalence of respiratory conditions among schoolchildren exposed to different levels of air pollutants in the Haifa Bay area, Israel.

Abstract

During spring 1984, 2334 second and 2000 fifth-grade schoolchildren living in three Haifa Bay areas on the eastern Mediterranean coast with different levels of air pollution were studied. The parents of these children filled out American Thoracic Society and National Heart and Lung Institute health questionnaires, and the children performed the following pulmonary function tests (PFT): FVC, FEV1, FEV,/FEV, PEF, FEF50, and FEF75. A trend of higher prevalence of most reported respiratory symptoms was found for schoolchildren growing up in the medium and high pollution areas as compared with the low pollution area. Part of the reported respiratory diseases were significantly more common among children from the high pollution area. Models fitted for the respiratory conditions that differed significantly among the three areas of residence also included background variables that could be responsible for these differences. Relative risk values, which were calculated from the logistic models, were in the range of 1.38 for sputum with cold and 1.81 for sputum without cold for children from the high pollution area as compared with 1.00 for children from the low pollution area. All the measured values of PFT were within the normal range. There was no consistent trend of reduced pulmonary function that characterized any residential area.

High prevalence of childhood asthma in Northern Israel is linked to air pollution by particulate matter: evidence from GIS analysis and Bayesian Model Averaging

“…These criteria are comparable with asthma definitions used in previous studies in Israel and abroad, and are usually lower than selfreported asthma symptoms by individuals (Castro-Rodriguez and Lemanske 2001; Raftery et al 2005;Romano-Zelekha et al 2007;Patel et al 2008). A more likely explanation is an increase in the number of asthmatic children the study area in recent years, that is, between the late 1980s (Goren et al 1990) and 2009, when the present study was carried out.…”

“…Our asthma rate estimates appear to be also higher than asthma prevalence (10%) reported by the Clalit Health Services or revealed in a previous study by Goren et al (1990). These large differences cannot solely be attributed to differences in asthma definition, since our study did not include self-reported symptoms of wheezing or whistling as a definable criterion of asthma, but only the diagnosis of asthma recorded by a physician, or defined according to the medical treatment a child received.…”

“…Second, most previous studies carried out in Israel and abroad were based on zonal approaches to the estimation of exposure, according to which the same exposure levels are assigned to all residents of relatively large statistical areas or townships (Goren et al 1990;Goren and Hellmann 1997;Peled et al 2001;Elliott et al 2004). Conversely, in our analysis, we used the recently developed IEE approach.…”

“…GHMA, which forms our study area, hosts several major industrial enterprises, including oil refineries, a major power station (with a production capacity of 450 MW), and several smaller petrochemical facilities, and is considered to be highly polluted (Goren et al 1990). The GHMA has a total population of about 500,000 residents and consists of seven separate municipalities (townships): Haifa (267,000 residents), Qiryat Tivon (13,100 residents), Nesher (21,300 residents), Qiryat Ata (49,600 residents), Qiryat Motzkin (39,600 residents), Qiryat Bialik (36,400 residents) and Qiryat Yam (37,000 residents) (see Figure 1).…”

Prevalence of asthma in 13-14 yr-old schoolchildren across Israel

“…The geographic differences in asthma rates may be explained by the higher altitude of the Northern and Jerusalem districts, and by different levels of air pollutants in these districts [24]. An association between asthma morbidity and levels of air pollutants was reported in the Haifa and Tel Aviv districts [25,26].…”