Air quality and health: looking ahead

Evolving scientific insights over the past twenty years. The past twenty years have seen major changes in the techniques and findings of studies on air pollution and health, changes which set today’s stage for looking forward to what remains to be learned. Beginning in 1993 and 1995, with the publication of the first modern population studies of long-term effects of air pollution in the Harvard Six Cities Study (Dockery et al., 1993) and the American Cancer Society (ACS) Study (Pope et al.,1995), a number of studies published in North America and Europe have found associations with premature mortality and other health effects at lower and lower levels of ambient air pollution (Hoek et al., 2013).