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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Mona Choi, PhD, RN, National Center for Public Health Informatics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2500 Shallowford RD. NE, 4223, Atlanta, GA 30345, 404-498-6627, choimona@gmail.com and Frank C. Curriero, PhD, Department of Environmental Health Sciences and Department of Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 615 North Wolfe Street, Baltimore, MD 21205.

The EPA sets the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for air pollutants considered harmful to public health and the environment. Exceedance of those standards can be more harmful for the vulnerable population, such as children, elderly, or people with low socioeconomic status. Although locating monitoring stations was mainly to measure air pollution for alerting public in highly populated areas, those who live in rural areas also have a right to know how high or low air pollution levels are in their local area. Geostatistics is a method to estimate the air pollution concentration where ozone stations do not exist. The previous time-series studies of air pollution and health outcomes mainly focused on a temporal trend and did not include socioeconomic status as a factor because they assumed socioeconomic status might not be varied during a certain time period. The purpose of the study is to use geostatistics in combination with GIS to estimate ozone levels to investigate the association between ozone concentrations and emergency department (ED) visits for cardiovascular and respiratory conditions at the ZIP code level in Maryland. This ecological cross-sectional study will use block kriging, a geostatistical technique, for estimating ozone exposures at the ZIP code level during summer of 2002. The results will be presented by age groups to examine whether ozone influences differently for children and elderly. Analyses by stratified socioeconomic status will also be presented for the association between ozone and ED visits.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand geostatistics as an interpolation technique to estimate ozone concentrations for areas without ozone stations
• Understand ozone exposures and other covariates including socioeconomic status related to ED visits for cardiovascular and respiratory conditions

Keywords: Environmental Health, Environmental Justice

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Recorded presentation