Estudo da relação da qualidade do ar e variáveis meteorológicas na ocorrência de morbidade respiratória e circulatória na região metropolitana de São Paulo

Abstract

The main objective of this study was to evaluate the relationship between air pollution and human health, focusing on the Metropolitan Area of São Paulo (MASP). With a population of nearly 20 million people and numerous sources of air pollutants, where the vehicles are highlighted, pollution levels in the region are high have contributed to reducing the population's quality of life.In this sense, the study investigated the association between air quality and meteorological variables and hospital morbidity, determined the cost of hospital admissions related to air pollution and determined the risk attributable to the pollutants O3 and PM10. To develop the work an air quality and meteorological database was used, for the period 2008 to 2011, provided by Environmental Company of São Paulo State (CETESB), Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences of São Paulo University (IAG / USP) and National Institute of Meteorology (INMET). The relationship between health and the concentrations of O3, PM10, NO2 and weather conditions was highlighted. Monthly data from public health hospital admissions for respiratory and circulatory diseases for different age range for MASP were obtained from the database of the Unified Health System (SUS). Through the use of the software R (version 3.0.1) the methodology Generalized Linear Models with Poisson distribution was applied to check the existence of a relationship between the study variables. Results indicated tha the Negative Binomial probability distribution as the most appropriate to the data set and through this was associations between O3, PM10, NO2, temperature, humidity and hospitalizations for respiratory and circulatory diseases. The analysis of the attributable risk found that the pollutants O3 and PM10 are mainly associated with occurrence of respiratory diseases and that there was an increase in the number of the hospitalizations over the analyzed period. The cities of São Paulo, Guarulhos and São Bernardo do Campo had the highest number of hospitalizations associated with pollutants. Hospital expenditures associated with O3 and PM10 reached approximately R$ 35 million between 2008 and 2011. It is expected that the development of the study may contribute to improving knowledge on the relationship between health and air pollution, allows the impact assessment of future climate scenarios in health and also serve as a warning to the deleterious effects on human health in the MASP.