Recent rapid motorization in Japan has posed the serious problem of air pollution caused by automobile exhaust.
Route 43, the national highway linking Osaka and Kobe for a length of 30km, has the highest congestions of vehicular traffic in Japan and runs through densely residential areas. Children in schools located along this highway have been found to have increasing rates of respiratory disorders.
NO
2 concentrations near Route 43 have exceeded the short-term exposure limit (0.10-0.17ppm), proposed as the guideline for the protection of public health by WHO Task Group, which also recommended that this limit be stricter for sensitive subjects such as children and that consideration be made for the interaction of NO
2 with other pollutants.
In 1979, the authors polled children concerning respiratory, rhinopharyngeal and eye disorders in two elementary schools facing Route 43 and one school in a non-polluted area, using a self-administered questionnaire.
Occurrence of these illnesses was analyzed in term of (1) the distance between children's homes and the highway, (2) grade in school and (3) the direction their homes faced, using “score methods” for tests of the linear trend of prevalence.
Results were as follows:
1. Children attending the two polluted schools had higher rates of disorders relating to bronchial asthma, recurrent respiratory infection and allergies than those at the school in the non-polluted area. The highest occurrence was found where there was the most pollution, Seido Elementary School.
2. A close relationship was found between the prevalence of such conditions and distance from the highway-the closer the children lived, the more frequent were their illnesses. The authors demonstrated that this gradient for the occurrence of respiratory and eye disorders corresponded to the level nitrogen oxides.
3. Air conditioners furnished at schools appeared to have some remedying effect on these disorders.
4. Children who lived south of the highway had higher rates of disease. This was caused by higher concentration of exhaust carried at night by northerly winds.
The authors have discussed the relationship between automobile exhaust and the above findings mentioned. They concluded that there seemed to be a correspondence between such findings and the adverse effects of NO
2 exposure on experimental animals and/or man, such as an increase in susceptibility to respiratory infection, immunological effects and an increased incidence of respiratory disorders, as recently reported.
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