| In public health, there is an ongoing need for improved measures of environmental exposures that can be applied to human health risk assessment. To evaluate human health risk from environmental pollutants to large populations, sophisticated methods that estimate exposures over specified geographical areas are needed. At the present time, studies attempting to evaluate the impact of air pollution on public health use summarized and uncertain surrogates for spatially distributed pollution. This research presented sophisticated means of estimating environmental exposures. In particular, geographic information systems provide efficient methods for determining exposure indices, allowing for geographically relevant estimations. The research uses Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) emission sites and fine Particulate Matter (PM10) emission sites as the source of pollution emissions. Six counties of Western Pennsylvania provide the geographic area of study. |
