Wildfire and African dust aerosol oxidative potential, exposure and dose in the human respiratory tract
Exposure to wildfire smoke and dust can severely affect air quality and health. Although particulate matter (PM) levels and exposure are well -established metrics linking to health outcomes, they do not consider differences in particle toxicity or deposition location in the respiratory tract (RT). Usage of the oxidative potential (OP) exposure may further shape our understanding on how different pollution events impact health. Towards this goal, we estimate the aerosol deposition rates, OP and resulting OP deposition rates in the RT for a typical adult Caucasian male residing in Athens, Greece. We focus on a period when African dust (1-3 of August 2021) and severe wildfires at the northern part of the Attika peninsula and the Evia island, Greece (4-18 of August 2021) affected air quality in Athens. During these periods, the aerosol levels increased twofold leading to exceedances of the World Health Organization (WHO) [15(5) mu g m(-3)] PM10 (PM2.5) air quality standard by almost 100 %. We show that the OP exposure is 1.5 -times larger during the wildfire smoke events than during the dust intrusion, even if the latter was present in higher mass loads - because wildfire smoke has a higher specific OP than dust. This result carries two important implications: OP exposure should be synergistically used with other metricssuch as PM levels - to efficiently link aerosol exposure with the resulting health effects, and, certain sources of air pollution (in our case, exposure to biomass burning smoke) may need to be preferentially controlled, whenever possible, owing to their disproportionate contribution to OP exposure and ability to penetrate deeper into the human RT.
WOS:001154343200001
2024-01-06
913
169683
REVIEWED
Funder | Grant Number |
Research and Innovation (HFRI) under the HFRI PhD Fellowship grant | 669 |
European Union (European Social Fund-ESF) through the Operational Programme "Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning" | MIS-5033021 |
European Research Council | ERC-2016-COG |
European Union | 874753 |
Swiss National Science Foundation | 192292 |
PANhellenic infrastructure for Atmospheric Composition and climatE change" | MIS 5021516 |
Operational Programme "Competitiveness, Entrepreneurship and Innovation" - European Union | 262 254 |
European Commission | 654109 |
Horizon 2020 research and innovation program of the European Commission | |
Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation project: Mineralogy of Dust Emissions | 703 |