Study of the Effects of Air Pollutants on Human Health Based on Baidu Indices of Disease Symptoms and Air Quality Monitoring Data in Beijing, China

Shaobo Zhong, Zhichen Yu and Wei Zhu
Additional contact information
Shaobo Zhong: Beijing Research Center of Urban Systems Engineering, Beijing 100035, China
Zhichen Yu: Department of Engineering Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Wei Zhu: Beijing Research Center of Urban Systems Engineering, Beijing 100035, China

IJERPH, 2019, vol. 16, issue 6, 1-19

Abstract: There is an increasing body of evidence showing the impact of air pollutants on human health such as on the respiratory, and cardio- and cerebrovascular systems. In China, as people begin to pay more attention to air quality, recent research focused on the quantitative assessment of the effects of air pollutants on human health. To assess the health effects of air pollutants and to construct an indicator placing emphasis on health impact, a generalized additive model was selected to assess the health burden caused by air pollution. We obtained Baidu indices (an evaluation indicator launched by Baidu Corporation to reflect the search popularity of keywords from its search engine) to assess daily query frequencies of 25 keywords considered associated with air pollution-related diseases. Moreover, we also calculated the daily concentrations of major air pollutants (including PM 10 , PM 2.5 , SO 2 , O 3 , NO 2 , and CO) and the daily air quality index (AQI) values, and three meteorological factors: daily mean wind level, daily mean air temperature, and daily mean relative humidity. These data cover the area of Beijing from 1 March 2015 to 30 April 2017. Through the analysis, we produced the relative risks (RRs) of the six main air pollutants for respiratory, and cardio- and cerebrovascular diseases. The results showed that O 3 and NO 2 have the highest health impact, followed by PM 10 and PM 2.5 . The effects of any pollutant on cardiovascular diseases was consistently higher than on respiratory diseases. Furthermore, we evaluated the currently used AQI in China and proposed an RR-based index (health AQI, HAQI) that is intended for better indicating the effects of air pollutants on respiratory, and cardio- and cerebrovascular diseases than AQI. A higher Pearson correlation coefficient between HAQI and RR Total than that between AQI and RR Total endorsed our efforts.

Keywords: air pollution; air quality index; generalized additive model; Baidu index; cardio- and cerebrovascular disease; respiratory disease (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/6/1014/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/6/1014/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:16:y:2019:i:6:p:1014-:d:215604

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().