Background. Numerous studies have examined the impact of air pollution on human health in urban areas of the United States, Western Europe, and Asia. The former Soviet Union (USSR) failed to demonstrate comparable concern about environmental health as evidenced by minimal emissions controls for routine releases of air pollutants and declining Soviet era average life expectancy between the 1960s and 1980s. With the breakup of the USSR in the early 1990s, this raises the question of the relationship between urban air pollution and the risk of excess mortality (i.e., attributable deaths) in Russia.
Data and Methods. Extensive time series data are unavailable for the Soviet era so studies must focus on a subset of cities for which post-Soviet air quality data are available in order to empirically assess the relationship between urban air pollution and human health risk in Russia. Limited data are available for 10 major Russian urban areas (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Voronezh, Rostov-on-Don, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Samara, Volgograd, Nizhni-Novgorod, and Saratov) in 1993 and 1998 for at least one those urban areas for one or more major contaminants of concern (formaldehyde, benzene, cadmium, and chromium) that are known or suspected human carcinogens for one or both years.
Implications. Application of the unit risk factor approach developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for estimating the impact of differentials in pollutant concentrations on cancer mortality makes possible extrapolation of a theoretically plausible baseline estimate for mortality associated with exposures. |
