Search

Ambient air pollution is nowadays one of the most crucial contributors to deteriorating health status worldwide. The components of air pollution include PM2.5 and PM10, NO2, SO2, CO, O3, and organic compounds. They are attributed to several health outcomes, for instance, cardiovascular diseases (CVD), respiratory diseases, birth outcomes, neurologic diseases, and psychiatric diseases. The objective of this study is to evaluate the association between different ambient air pollutants and the above-mentioned health outcomes. In this systematic review, a total of 76 articles was ultimately selected from 2653 articles, through multiple screening steps by the aid of a set of exclusion criteria as non-English articles, indoor air pollution assessment, work-related, occupational and home-attributed pollution, animal studies, tobacco smoking effects, letters to editors, commentaries, animal experiments, reviews, case reports and case series, out of 19,862 published articles through a systematic search in PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus. Then, the associations between air pollution and different health outcomes were measured as relative risks and odds ratios. The association between air pollutants, PM2.5 and PM10, NO2, SO2, CO, O3, and VOC with major organ systems health was investigated through the gathered studies. Relative risks and/or odds ratios attributed to each air pollutant/outcome were ultimately reported. In this study, a thorough and comprehensive discussion of all aspects of the contribution of ambient air pollutants in health outcomes was proposed. To our knowledge up to now, there is no such comprehensive outlook on this issue. Growing concerns in concert with air pollution-induced health risks impose a great danger on the life of billions of people worldwide. Should we propose ideas and schemes to reduce ambient air pollutant, there will be dramatic reductions in the prevalence and occurrence of health-threatening conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the vulnerability of initial shock-damage reinforced concrete (RC) with steel frames in successive scenarios, as an essential part of developing a framework to consider seismic sequence hazard into structural design. For this, two sets of regular RC and steel moment resisting frames with 3, 5, 7, 10, 12 and 15 stories, are designed and analyzed under two different databases with/without seismic sequences in OpenSees software.The damage states of the model frames were then measured by the Park and Ang's damage index. From the results of this investigation, it is observed that only considering the mainshock will underestimate the seismic risk in both sets of RC and steel frames. The results of damage evaluation also reveal that RC frames have better performance than steel frames in seismic sequence phenomena. Furthermore, steel frames damage is about 53% more than the damage caused by RC frames under critical successive earthquakes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]