Standards - I don't get them...

[Amir Bernat]

The train station I commute to daily (Tell Aviv Hashalom) was found to have high levels of air pollution, it is one of Israel most used stations,and the trains we use are diesel powered. It is also situated ~20 meters below the street level and has both lanes of traffic of a very congested highway on both sides.
Recently, they started posting the measurements for PM2.5 and NO2, I tried to figure out just how bad it is, but all the standards I found were of 6-12 months.
What can I make sense from 80 uKg/ug for PM2.5 and 250 uKg/ug.
I'm guessing the units should be ug/m^3? Those values are indicated as generally being poor on a 4 scale level this is the third worst. Who can help me try and figure out just how bad is it?

[joan schnabel/jeff falk]

Amir, These two articles might be helpful. Let me know if they are not. Keep in mind that most standards are designed to keep long term effects below a certain risk level which is why they are expressed as yearly average or percentile. The US 24 hour standard for pm2.5 is more related to minimizing effects to compromised people, with asthma, old age, etc.
jeff falk

[dan mcquillan]

hi amir

i think the bottom line is that the so-called standards are pretty rubbish. they are outdated, and designed for a governmental perspective not a citizen one (e.g. city-scale measurement / modelling). 

here's a nice post by gwen ottinger, which shows the roots of different standards in occupational health, or laboratory studies.

http://issues.org/27-3/ottinger/ 

as she says, 

"But what neither she nor her counterpart in Louisiana had to work with were studies of what these chemicals did to people who breathed lots of them at a time, in low doses, every day... In the end, digging into the standards and learning how incomplete and uncertain they were convinced me that we don’t really have a good answer about exactly what the chemical levels mean for health"

also, here's a paper from january 2017 on 'Estimating Causal Effects of Local Air Pollution on Daily Deaths: Effect of Low Levels' https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/EHP232/

best

dan mcquillan

science for change kosovo|/ https://www.facebook.com/SfCKmovement

On 17 October 2017 at 16:29, joan schnabel/jeff falk <joan...@centurylink.net> wrote:

Amir,  These two articles might be helpful. Let me know if they are not.  Keep in mind that most standards are designed to keep long term effects below a certain risk level which is why they are expressed as yearly average or percentile.  The US 24 hour standard for pm2.5 is more related to minimizing effects to compromised people, with asthma, old age, etc.
jeff falk

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