Douglas W. Dockery | |
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| Alma mater | University of Maryland |
| Known for | Harvard Six Cities study |
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| Website | Official website  |
Douglas William Dockery is an American epidemiologist and the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Environmental Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH).
Dockery received his B.S. in physics from the University of Maryland and his M.S. in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972, where he submitted a thesis titled "An Analytic Study of the Predictability of the Flow in a Dish-Pan Model of the Atmosphere". [1] Later, he gained an M.S. and DSc in environmental health from the Harvard School of Public Health. [2]
Dockery was appointed an assistant professor at HSPH in 1987, where he was promoted to associate professor in 1990 and full professor in 1998. [2] In 2005, he became chair of the department of environmental health at HSPH. [2] In 2008, he was appointed director of the Harvard-NIEHS Center for Environmental Health Sciences. [2]
In the 1970s and 80s, Dockery led the Harvard Six Cities study, the results of which were published in 1993 in the New England Journal of Medicine. In the study, Dockery and his co-authors (including C. Arden Pope) reported that air pollution was associated with increased mortality. [3] The results of this study have been used by the Environmental Protection Agency as the basis for their regulations on fine particulate matter in 1997, [4] and, as of 2005, was the most-cited air-pollution study ever published. [5] In 2009, Dockery co-authored another study which found that improvements in air quality in 51 American cities had led to life expectancies of people living there increasing by as much as five months. [6] [7] [8]
Smog, or smoke fog, is a type of intense air pollution. The word "smog" was coined in the early 20th century, and is a portmanteau of the words smoke and fog to refer to smoky fog due to its opacity, and odor. The word was then intended to refer to what was sometimes known as pea soup fog, a familiar and serious problem in London from the 19th century to the mid-20th century, where it was commonly known as a London particular or London fog. This kind of visible air pollution is composed of nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxide, ozone, smoke and other particulates. Man-made smog is derived from coal combustion emissions, vehicular emissions, industrial emissions, forest and agricultural fires and photochemical reactions of these emissions.
Exhaust gas or flue gas is emitted as a result of the combustion of fuels such as natural gas, gasoline (petrol), diesel fuel, fuel oil, biodiesel blends, or coal. According to the type of engine, it is discharged into the atmosphere through an exhaust pipe, flue gas stack, or propelling nozzle. It often disperses downwind in a pattern called an exhaust plume.
The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is the public health school of Harvard University, located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. The school grew out of the Harvard-MIT School for Health Officers, the nation's first graduate training program in population health, which was founded in 1913 and then became the Harvard School of Public Health in 1922.
Air pollution in Hong Kong is considered a serious problem. In 2004, visibility was less than eight kilometers for 30 per cent of the year. Cases of asthma and bronchial infections have soared due to reduced air quality. However, in recent years, the hours of reduced visibility in Hong Kong have decreased by significant amounts compared to the previous ten years.
C. Arden Pope III is an American professor of economics at Brigham Young University and one of the world's foremost experts in environmental science. He received his B.S. from Brigham Young University (BYU) in 1978 and his Ph.D. in economics and statistics from Iowa State University in 1981. Although his research includes many papers on topics in the fields in which he was trained—environmental economics, resource economics, and agricultural economics—he is better known for his cross-disciplinary work in environmental epidemiology and public health. He is world-renowned for his seminal work on the effects of particulate air pollution on mortality and health. His articles have helped establish the connection between air pollution and health problems, including cancer, cardiovascular, and pulmonary disease. These research findings have influenced environmental policy in the United States and Europe, contributing to the establishment of emission standards for particulate matter pollution.
Air pollution is the contamination of air due to the presence of substances in the atmosphere that are harmful to the health of humans and other living beings, or cause damage to the climate or to materials. It is also the contamination of indoor or outdoor surrounding either by chemical activities, physical or biological agents that alters the natural features of the atmosphere. There are many different types of air pollutants, such as gases, particulates, and biological molecules. Air pollution can cause diseases, allergies, and even death to humans; it can also cause harm to other living organisms such as animals and crops, and may damage the natural environment or built environment. Air pollution can be caused by both human activities and natural phenomena.
Ultrafine particles (UFPs) are particulate matter of nanoscale size (less than 0.1 μm or 100 nm in diameter). Regulations do not exist for this size class of ambient air pollution particles, which are far smaller than the regulated PM10 and PM2.5 particle classes and are believed to have several more aggressive health implications than those classes of larger particulates. In the EU UFP's in ambient air are empirically defined by a technical specification. The important detail is the definition of size, stated: "The lower and upper sizes considered within this document are 7 nm and a few micrometres, respectively". Although the most common referral to UFP is "less than 0.1μm", this is incorrect for ambient air in the EU.
Air pollution is the introduction of chemicals, particulate matter, or biological materials into the atmosphere, causing harm or discomfort to humans or other living organisms, or damaging ecosystems. Air pollution can cause health problems including, but not limited to, infections, behavioral changes, cancer, organ failure, and premature death. These health effects are not equally distributed across the U.S population; there are demographic disparities by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and education. Air pollution can derive from natural sources, or anthropogenic sources. Anthropogenic air pollution has affected the United States since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Organic molecular tracers in pollution control and environmental science are referred to as organic molecular markers or emission markers, and are compounds or compound classes. These tracers are of interest in the field of air quality because they can help identify particulate emission sources, as they are relatively unique to those sources. This approach is generally applied to particulate matter under 2.5μm in diameter because of the formation mechanisms and the health risks associated with this size regime. With tracer compounds, the principles of mass balance are used to 'trace' emissions from the source to the receptor site where a sample is taken. Use of organic tracers has become more common as measurement quality has improved, costs have decreased, and compounds that were historically good tracers, such as lead, have decreased in ambient concentrations due to various factors including government regulation.
Particulates or atmospheric particulate matter are microscopic particles of solid or liquid matter suspended in the air. The term aerosol commonly refers to the particulate/air mixture, as opposed to the particulate matter alone. Sources of particulate matter can be natural or anthropogenic. They have impacts on climate and precipitation that adversely affect human health, in ways additional to direct inhalation.
Air pollution measurement is the process of collecting and measuring the components of air pollution, notably gases and particulates. The earliest devices used to measure pollution include rain gauges, Ringelmann charts for measuring smoke, and simple soot and dust collectors known as deposit gauges. Modern air pollution measurement is largely automated and carried out using many different devices and techniques. These range from simple absorbent test tubes known as diffusion tubes through to highly sophisticated chemical and physical sensors that give almost real-time pollution measurements, which are used to generate air quality indexes.
The World Health Organization guidelines were most recently updated in 2021. The guidelines offer guidance about these air pollutants: particulate matter (PM), ozone (O3), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2) and carbon monoxide (CO). The WHO first released the air quality guidelines in 1987, then updated them in 1997. The reports provide guidelines intending to give guidelines to reduce the health effects of air pollution.
AirQ+ is a free software for Windows and Linux operating systems developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe. The program calculates the magnitude of several health effects associated to exposure to the most relevant air pollutants in a given population. AirQ+ has been used in the BreatheLife campaign and in numerous studies aimed at measuring long-term exposure to ambient particulate matter PM2.5. The first version of the program, AirQ, was distributed in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet program in 1999, followed by another version of AirQ for Windows in 2000. A substantial difference between AirQ and AirQ+ is that AirQ+ contains a new graphical user interface with several help texts and various features to input and analyse data and illustrate results. AirQ+ version 1.3 was released in October 2018, version 2.0 in November 2019 and version 2.1 in May 2021. It is available in English, French, German and Russian.
Air quality in Utah is often some of the worst in the United States. Poor air quality in Utah is due to the mountainous topography which can cause pollutants to build up near the surface combined with the prevalence of emissions from gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles, especially older models. Burning wood fuel for home heating can also contribute significantly to poor air quality. Homes heated with wood contribute about 3000 times the amount of pollution as homes heated with natural gas. About 50% of air pollution in Salt Lake County is from vehicles.
Michelle L. Bell is an American environmental engineer. Since 2015, she has been the Mary E. Pinchot Professor of Environmental Health at the Yale School of the Environment. In 2020, Bell was named a member of the National Academy of Medicine for her research into understanding the critical links between the environment and public health.
The Harvard "Six Cities" study was a major epidemiological study of over 8,000 adults in six American cities that helped to establish the connection between fine-particulate air pollution and reduced life expectancy. Widely acknowledged as a landmark piece of public health research, it was initiated by Benjamin G. Ferris, Jr at Harvard School of Public Health and carried out by Harvard's Douglas Dockery, C. Arden Pope of Brigham Young University, Ferris himself, Frank E. Speizer, and four other collaborators, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1993. Following a lawsuit by The American Lung Association, the study, and its various follow-ups, led to a tightening of pollution standards by the US Environmental Protection Agency. This prompted an intense backlash from industry groups in the late 1990s, culminating in a Supreme Court case, in what Science magazine termed "the biggest environmental fight of the decade".
Particulate pollution is pollution of an environment that consists of particles suspended in some medium. There are three primary forms: atmospheric particulate matter, marine debris, and space debris. Some particles are released directly from a specific source, while others form in chemical reactions in the atmosphere. Particulate pollution can be derived from either natural sources or anthropogenic processes.
Frank Erwin Speizer is an American physician and epidemiologist, currently Professor of Environmental Health and Environmental Science at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Edward H. Kass Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He is best known for his work on two major epidemiological cohort studies: the Nurses' Health Study, which explored women's illnesses and health risk factors, and the Harvard Six Cities study, which definitively linked air pollution to higher death rates in urban areas.
Francine Laden is an American epidemiologist who is Professor of Environmental Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research has investigated the environmental epidemiology of chronic disease. She serves as co-director of the Harvard University and Boston University center for research on environmental and social stressors in housing across the life course. Laden has also served on the United States Environmental Protection Agency advisory board.
Lester Barnard Lave was an American economist who helped pioneer the field of environmental economics, notably the idea that environmental problems have quantifiable economic costs. In August 1970, over two decades before the Harvard Six Cities study definitively settled the issue, Lave and his graduate student Eugene P. Seskin published research suggesting that air pollution in American cities was causing higher death rates and attempted to calculate its economic cost. Lave went on to publish books and papers on many other environmental issues, including toxic chemicals, soil carbon, and electric cars, and studied methodological tools such as cost-benefit and risk analysis. At the time of his death, he was Harry B. and James H. Higgins Professor of Economics at the Tepper School of Business, professor of engineering and public policy, director of the Green Design Institute, and co-director of the Electricity Industry Center at Carnegie Mellon University.
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