Environment and Climate

Health risk assessment of air pollution in two cities

Principal Investigator: Clarence Tam

The project aims to examine the adverse effect of air pollution on health in Singapore and quantify it as relative risk. Although many studies reported the risks of air pollution through epidemiological methods, no study was conducted in Singapore due to the unavailability of data.

With the newly developed Discovery AI in National University Health System (NUHS), de-identified daily emergency visit data can be obtained. Thus, this will be the first study of its type in Singapore. The results from this study can provide risk estimates of different air pollutants on the morbidity. The study will also collect data from Hong Kong for the same period and compute the risk estimates. Thus, a comparison between the two places, with similar population, size and economic status, can be carried out.

With the results, the research team will be able to provide prediction of the additional number of admissions to emergency rooms due to high level of air pollution. Policy makers can implement administrative measures to reduce the burden in the emergency rooms.