Scientists look back to predict the future

Research leader Bill Physick from the Atmospheric Research Division of CSIRO

Analysing six years worth of weather and air quality records for Brisbane and Melbourne is providing Flagship scientists with a useful basis to develop future health warnings for people suffering ailments affected by environmental conditions such as asthma.

Researchers based at CSIRO Atmospheric Research are working with the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH), the Environment Protection Authority Victoria and the Environment Protection Agency of Queensland on the Preventative Health project aimed at developing a health forecasting system.

Project Leader Dr Bill Physick says meteorology and air pollution are associated with a range of health effects including increased hospitalisation and death in vulnerable groups such as older people suffering cardiovascular or respiratory ailments, stroke, asthma or influenza and children under five years with asthma, influenza or respiratory conditions.

"People’s health can suffer within hours or days after being exposed to air pollution or excessively hot or cold spells and variations of other conditions such as relative humidity,” Dr Physick says.

“Experience elsewhere reinforces the importance of atmospheric environmental conditions to population health. For example in the United Kingdom the link between temperature and hospital admissions is so strong that health officials coordinate with the Meteorological Office to issue forecasts of regional hospital workloads for the coming week.”

That’s why his team has been analysing health data collected over a six-year period (from 1998 to 2003), correlating it with meteorological and air quality data in the form of daily gridded fields of different pollutant concentrations across Brisbane and Melbourne.

This is then being used by NCEPH, in conjunction with hospital admission data for various diseases in Melbourne and Brisbane, to create dose (exposure) response functions for each pollutant to determine the effects of daily changes in weather and air pollution parameters on measures if illness in the population.

This work is leading the project team towards its ultimate goal of developing a model for short-term forecasting of changes in risk of disease occurrence, hospitalisation or mortality with changing weather or air pollution profiles.

Drawing on recent advances in bio-marker and nanotechnology, researchers plan to investigate the feasibility of developing personal samplers for air pollutants, to identify pollutant levels which could be harmful for respiratory ailments such as asthma.

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The Preventative Health Flagship is a CSIRO initiative and part of the National Research Flagships program that aims to deliver scientific solutions to advance Australia's most important national objectives. One of the largest scientific initiatives ever mounted in Australia, it aligns closely with the Federal Government's National Research Priorities. The initiative brings together our national research resources to deliver breakthroughs in fields ranging from healthcare to light metals and the environment.

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