Estimating the morbidity from air pollution and its economic costs

The health impacts of air pollution are well known, and efforts are being made worldwide to improve air quality and reduce exposure to harmful levels of air pollutants.

WHO has created a new project, called Estimating the Morbidity from Air Pollution and its Economic Costs (EMAPEC), to provide expert technical and advisory support on the adverse health effects of air pollution and the different morbidities it causes. The project has a special focus on the development of economic assessments.

EMAPEC will establish a methodology to estimate economic costs of selected morbidity outcomes of exposure to air pollution within a population.  A pilot test for one or two case studies will explore challenges that may result from a lack of data, and address various geographical scales (regional, national, and global) and different contexts.

Currently EMAPEC is:

• reviewing the epidemiological scientific literature on morbidity impacts of air pollution, and select concentration-response functions for economically important diseases;
• identifying suitable background morbidity statistics and compiling data sets for selected regions and countries; and
• developing methods for the quantification of the economic costs of morbidity for different regions.

EMAPEC will also conduct an assessment of morbidity costs of air pollution for selected countries.

This projects also benefits from the on-going project of the WHO European Center on Environment and Health to update the Health Risks of Air Pollution in Europe (HRAPIE-2)

Experts from different institutions are participating to the project. In particular, from Imperial College London (UK); Santé Publique (France); CNRS - AMSE - Aix-Marseille University (France); University of Copenhagen (Denmark); International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis – IIASA (Austria); London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (UK); Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas – CONICET (Argentina); Institute for Clinical Effectiveness and Health Policy (Argentina); Ministry of Public Health (Thailand).

A systematic review on "Choices of morbidity outcomes and concentration-response functions for quantitative health impact assessment of air pollution: an umbrella review of systematic reviews and meta-analyses" was submitted to the PROSPERO register (International prospective register of systematic reviews) in February 2023.

Furthermore, the “choices of morbidity outcomes and concentration–response functions for health risk assessment of long-term exposure to air pollution” article was published in the August 2024 issue of Environmental Epidemiology. 

If you are interested in this work, please contact the Air Quality, Energy and Health Unit at aqe_who@who.int