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A team of UWindsor researchers is collaborating with researchers from Wayne State University and healthcare professionals from Canada and the U.S., to study the impact of air pollution on people with asthma.
The UWindsor team includes Xiaohong (Iris) Xu, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and an expert in air quality monitoring, Alice Grgicak-Mannion, a geospatial learning specialist in the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research (GLIER) and Phil Graniero, an associate professor in inter-faculty programs and coordinator of the Environmental Studies program.
The team set up 100 air quality monitoring stations – 30 in Windsor and 70 in Detroit – during a two-week period. The stations were placed in various locations, including transportation corridors and factories, to map the distribution of nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, volatile organic compounds, polyaromatic hydrocarbons and particulate matter. The pollutants arise from exhaust fumes and certain industrial processes.
The research team used data from hospital emergency rooms in Windsor, as well as Detroit’s Henry Ford Health System, to record numbers of patients with asthma-related symptoms during the same two-week period. The team then compared this information with air quality results collected from the monitoring stations. The experiment was repeated during a second two-week period during spring, when asthma sufferers typically report higher than normal breathing difficulties.
“There is a lot of concern about air quality,” says Dr. Graniero. “Asthma can be stimulated by biological reactions to physical or chemical irritants and there’s a lot of stuff floating in the air from our own industrial processes, as well as from the Chicago corridor. We know that air quality doesn’t stop at an international border.”
The group will create map-based models to illustrate geographic areas with higher-than-normal pollutant-related medical incidents, with the goal of influencing the decisions of environmental policy makers.
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