JRC’s Activities on Emerging Environmental Health Issues: Indoor Air Quality

The focus of the JRC strategy for the E&H area is on how to optimally integrateenvironment and health information on a common platform (the EuropeanEnvironment and Health Information System) and to develop methodologies toanalyse and unveil causal relationships between environmental risk factors and humanhealth outcomes. This includes the development and validation of methods andmethodologies for monitoring, for exposure assessment and for evaluation andquantification of health effects due to environmental stressors. The JRC will cooperatewith the EEA, WHO and other international and national organisations toprovide the best support to the building of the platform for integrating the informationon environmental quality, health and research to support the E&H policy-makingprocess. In order to cover the whole chain from pollutant to disease, the JRC activitiesin E&H will be organized within three interrelated areas covering informationintegration, exposure assessment and health effects.In the area of indoor air quality, JRC on the basis of competencies developed over thelast two decades and on existing collaborations with known European experts iscarrying out research providing support to Commission services for theimplementation of health related Directives and regulations.In line with the Commissions Environment and Health Strategy and Action Plan,launched in June 2004, JRC has provided support for the formulation and execution ofprojects on indoor air quality (INDEX project), which are dealing with the assessmentof existing knowledge worldwide on:?? Type and levels of chemicals in indoor air and?? Available toxicological information to allow the assessment of risk to healthand comfort.The main outcome of the INDEX project was the prioritization of chemicalcompounds and suggestions for the establishment of indoor exposure limits in the EU.Following the recommendations of the Workshop on Urban Air, Indoor Environmentand Human Exposure in Thessaloniki/Greece in April 2000 (The Thessalonikistatement), that future clean air policies should take into account the total human airexposure of European citizens, which will necessarily include exposures to pollutantsfrom both outdoor and indoor sources, in order to fill in the existing gaps ininformation on levels and distribution of air pollutants indoors, JRC is carrying outwith the support of partners from the Member States field studies at European level, toevaluate indoor/outdoor relationships and personal exposure concentrations forpriority air pollutants and for different confined environments (AIRMEX project).Preliminary evidence indicates that:?? In reference to the EU ambient air limit value for benzene of 5 ?g/m3 (annualmean) to be introduced by the year 2010, about 28% of the measured outdoorconcentrations, 30% of the indoor concentrations, and 40.5% of the personalexposure concentrations exceeded this limit value.?? In Southern European cities indoor/outdoor as well as personal exposureconcentrations are higher than in cities of Central Europe. In Athens andCatania in buildings located in the city centre there is almost no differencebetween indoor and outdoor pollutant levels.?? Concentrations in schools and kindergartens are generally lower than in publicbuildings and offices with public access.?? True personal exposures cannot be determined directly from measurementspertaining from fixed ambient background monitoring stations. In order toevaluate possible health effects associated with the presence of pollutantsindoors and outdoors the best way for this will be to carry out measurementsof personal exposure concentrations taking into account micro-environmentalactivity patterns and personal behaviour.