Air Pollution from Traffic and respiratory health in School Children

• Main Authors: Hsiao-Jung Cheng, 鄭筱蓉
• Other Authors: Yee-Chung Ma
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2002
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/93270662805163211432

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 環境衛生研究所 === 90 === Taipei city is the headquarters of administration departments in Taiwan local districts that have surrounding tall buildings, vehicles, and high density of population. Although there are no any big industrial parks, it has enormous traffic flows and economical activities that is the main factor of air quality has become worsened. The purpose of our research is to discuss with the relationship between traffic pollution and school children’s respiratory health that uses traffic flow as an index to evaluate whether traffic pollution exposure to school children’s respiratory health has harmful influence. According to intersection traffic flow characters of survey information from department of transportation of Taipei city government, such as a high traffic flow group of 9 schools has daily traffic flow greater than 100,000 units or low traffic flow group of 13 schools adjacent to mountain areas has less than 5,000 units, it coordinates EPA “Student’s respiratory health care inspection plan” information that uses the inspection results of lung function and asthmatic screen questionnaires to analyze asthma, respiratory symptom, lung function distributions between two groups of students whether they have any differences. As the results shown, the high traffic flow group of student’s prevalence of asthma is 11.6%; the low traffic flow group of student’s prevalence of asthma is 5.5% only. From statistics, it has obviously shown differences that the high group has odds ratio 2.2 greater than the low group (p<0.001). Furthermore, this research has found that the student’s possibility of tachypnoea risk is odds ratio 1.7 higher than the comparison group. In the lung function inspection part, it has shown that the value of FEV1/FVC for schoolboy and schoolgirl is higher than the low group(p<0.05). Although the difference of FVC and FEV1 has not shown significant, the low group of student’s lung function is tendency better than the high group. Hence, it has shown that the student’s respiratory symptom conditions of high peak of traffic flows in urban is more serious than that of the student in suburban, such as highly risk of asthma, tachypnoea, and severe breath after sport, and also shown exposure to the student’s respiratory health in the traffic pollution that has detrimental influence. Because this study is a cross- sectional approach, it can be further discussed with the relation between cause and effect and other factors of influence. The main factors of student’s lung function are age, height, and sport. However, the inspection results of lung function and the influence of lung functional obstacle for high or low traffic flows are not apparently.