Poor Air Quality and Its Association with Mortality in Ho Chi Minh City: Case Study
As a result, in recent years the city experienced the exacerbated problem of air pollution with more frequent high Air Quality Index (AQI) during the year. The index is based on PMlevels since the particles are less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, also known as fine particles or PM, which poses a risk to human health at all levels. The concentration value was measured and obtained mostly from the US Embassy station and via low-cost sensor systems around the city by a Vietnamese company called PAMAIR. In the case of Vietnam in general and HCMC in particular, there is a shortage in continuous automatic monitoring stations that measure five major pollutants at the same time to calculate AQI, while compared to other pollutants, the effect of PMis most dominant in Vietnam and particularly in HCMC. Therefore, the AQI in the HCMC is mainly attributed by the concentrations of PM. Overall, for the past few years, the annual concentration of PMhas always been higher than the WHO recommended value (10 µg/m) and the Vietnamese standard QCVN 05:2013 (25 µg/m), even though the PMdistribution slightly decreased from 28 µg/min 2016 to 26.4 µg/min 2018 [ 6 7 ]. The proportion of AQI from 101 to 150, which is unhealthy for sensitive groups, also experienced a downward trend from 22.3% in 2016 to 15.6% in 2018. In contrast, there is an increase in the number of days with good air quality (AQI < 50), from 2.4% in 2016 to 6.1% in 2018. From the monitoring data obtained from the government agency (Department of Natural Resources and Environment, DONRE), which are collected manually, the city is often subject to a high concentration of Particulate Matter (PM), NO, CO, and Ozone. Noted that 93.8% of PM data recorded from the 19 traffic locations have exceeded The National Technical Regulation on Ambient Air Quality (QCVN 05: 2013/BTNMT). These high pollutant concentrations were associated with an increase in the risk of human health in HCMC [ 8 10 ]. The previous study on the relationship between air pollution and human health pointed out that over 90% of children less than 5 years old in HCMC were infected with some respiratory issues [ 9 ]. This study considered only two Children’s Hospitals in HCMC with the application of the correlation/statistical method. Another study [ 10 ] shows that the number of deaths related to PMin District 5, an administrative region in HCMC with a large population, was five persons/year in 2015, or 0.0025% in the total population of 194,228 and the PMpollution caused economic losses of more than USD 45 million. District 5, over a long history of development with many commercial activities and concentrated markets, is always crowded with tourists and shoppers. Moreover, the district is well-known for its dense road network covering the main axes North-South, East-West of the city. When extrapolating for HCMC, the death related to PMwas 204 persons/year, equivalent to economic losses of USD 1.836 billion. Up to now, there has been a lack of works focusing on evaluating the overall impact of PMas well as SOand NOon public health for HCMC. In 2019, an air pollution map over HCMC for many contaminations was released [ 4 ], together with the estimation of air emissions loading capacity for O, NO, SO, and CO [ 11 ]. However, a PMconcentration map has not been available for HCMC. Therefore, addressing this gap, this research aims to (i) Model the air pollutant profiles in simulation to obtain a comprehensive air pollution map of NO, SOand PMover HCMC; and (ii) Use the air pollution map of NO, SO, and PMto estimate the impact of these pollutants levels to mortality caused by ischemic heart disease (IHD), cardio-pulmonary and lung cancer for the whole HCMC.
