New centre to study environment's impact on health

The damage that our modern living and working environment could be doing to our health will be investigated by a new £5 million centre that launches today.

The MRC-HPA Centre for Environment and Health at Imperial College London and King’s College London will analyse the health of people across the UK and how this is affected by aspects of the environment in which they live and work. Aspects to be studies include traffic fumes, noise from overhead aircraft and chemicals in the environment such as the by-products of disinfection in the water supply.

The Centre will particularly focus on vulnerable people, including children and the elderly, and how environmental factors outside their control could be increasing their risk of respiratory problems, heart disease and cancer.

The Centre is core funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the UK’s Health Protection Agency (HPA), with the two universities funding new posts and studentships. Its researchers will be working with the HPA so that if their work reveals a new health risk, the HPA can take account of the centre’s findings in its advice to government.

Researchers estimate that air pollution alone could be causing several thousands of people to be admitted to hospital and die prematurely each year because of the damage minute particles of pollutants could do to the heart and lungs.

However, there is currently limited evidence about the effects of most pollutants on people’s health, because much of the relevant data comes from animal studies. Humans are typically exposed to low doses of pollutants, often acting in combination, over long periods of time. This makes their effects difficult to measure.

The new centre will conduct epidemiological studies of large numbers of people and analyse in detail which pollutants they are exposed to during their daily lives. Its researchers will use new tools in areas such as mapping, modelling, toxicology, genomics, proteomics and metabonomics to answer questions such as which pollutants people are being exposed to and when and how the levels of these change over time.

The researchers hope that the new work will help reveal where pollutants may be posing even small excess risks to health. Clusters of health problems could be visible in large groups that might not show up when looking at smaller groups of people.

“Your body has to deal with hundreds of different pollutants every day, the vast majority of which are probably harmless,” said Imperial College London’s Paul Elliott, director of the new centre. “However, we know that some pollutants can cause health problems — for example, some of the minute particles found in diesel fumes can make people’s asthma symptoms worse.”

One of the centre’s projects will explore whether land contaminated with chemicals could have a negative impact on health.

“It’s quite difficult to work out whether certain pollutants are affecting our health because we are exposed to so many, over such long periods of time,” Elliott said. “Our new centre is developing methods to look at the exposure of many thousands of people. Through this research we will investigate the extent, for example, a particular chemical is contributing to a particular health problem.”