[Monitoring personal exposures to environmental air pollutants]

The fields of environmental epidemiology and analytical chemistry should work more closely together and with careful planning, could result in the two discrete disciplines complementing each other in a most positive way. Some of the methods for sampling air and its subsequent analysis have been described and analytical measurements have been compared with subjective assessments. Some real world exposure values for respirable suspended particles and environmental tobacco smoke in Hong Kong and Beijing have been contrasted with those for Barcelona in Europe. Time weighted average concentrations were discussed and cumulative frequency distributions compared between cities.