Public health and the Air Management Information System (AMIS)

This paper discusses the importance of public health studies with respect to risk assessment and risk management in the framework of air quality management. This is performed with respect to the Air Management Information System (AMIS), which was set up recently by the World Health Organization. The Air Management Information System is an information-exchange system in the scheme of the Global Air Quality Partnership providing information on all issues of air quality management between its participants: municipalities, countries' environmental protection agencies, international organizations, World Bank and international development banks, and nongovernmental organizations. Public health studies of air pollution-induced health effects are an important ingredient for decisions with respect to the management of air quality. First, they are to be used to derive air quality standards from air quality guidelines. Secondly, they serve to assess the causal link between observed health effects in the population and the causative agents in the air. Thirdly, they can be used to estimate ideal (in the sense of not being expressed in monetary terms) or economic damage functions that are necessary to assess the magnitude of the ideal or economic damages to human health. The latter are necessary for a sensible cost-benefit analysis in which the costs of control measures to reduce air pollution are compared with the costs of health effects.