Speaker: Professor Tong Zhu, Dean, Cheung Kong Chair Professor, College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Director, Centre for Environment and Health, Peking University, China

Date: October 21, 2013 (Monday)

Time: 12:45 - 13:15

Venue: Seminar Room 7, LG1/F, Laboratory Block, Faculty of Medicine Building, 21 Sassoon Road, Pokfulam, Hong Kong

Abstract:

The 2012 Global Burden of Diseases Study has estimated that exposure to ambient air particulate matter (PM) could cause 3.2 million premature death per year globally, and 1.2 million in China. This estimation is mainly based on the results of the studies conducted in the developed countries. In the last decades, many epidemiological researches on the health effects of air pollutants have been carried out in China and provided results consistent with those found in other countries. Giving the complicate nature of air pollution and the chemical composition and physical properties of PM, the toxicological and epidemiological study on the health effects of air pollutants are hardly consistent, and the mechanism of mortality and morbidity caused by exposure to PM remains unclear. Air pollution control during the 2008 Beijing Olympics provided an intervention event for study the health effects of air pollutants. During this period, the air quality was drastically changed; we conducted the air pollution exposure, time series, panel study, and toxicological experiment to investigate the mechanism of the health effects of PM. Results and future challenging will be reported.