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RESULTS FROM EXPOSURE MONITORING PERFORMED DURING THE 1997 BALTIMORE PM PILOT STUDY
Citation:
Williams, R W., J P. Creason, R B. Zweidinger, R R. Watts, AND C. M. Shy. RESULTS FROM EXPOSURE MONITORING PERFORMED DURING THE 1997 BALTIMORE PM PILOT STUDY. Presented at Third Colloquium on Particulate Air Pollution and Public Health, Durham, NC, June 6-8, 1999.
Description:
An eighteen day winter-time ambient and personal exposure monitoring study of particulate matter (PM) was conducted as part of an.integrated epidemiological-exposure pilot study of an aged population. Goals of the study were to determine the feasibility of performing active personal exposure monitoring upon subjects over 65 years old living in a common retirement facility and to investigate activity patterns that might affect individual exposures. Daily measures of PM2.5 and PM,owere performed outside of the retirement center and at a community platform. Repeated PM2.5 measurements were conducted inside of the facility as a means to compare indoor/outdoor mass concentrations. Five elderly residents of a 3-story retirement facility were successfully recruited to wear PM,., active samplers on a MondaySaturday basis for three weeks (10 samples/subject) during the study period. Each sampling period represented a continuous 24-hour collection of potential breathing zone PM exposure. Collection of daily individual activity logs and survey questionnaires were utilized to develop activity profiles of all participants in the study. Results indicated that the outdoor PM,osize fraction was 82.7% PM2.5 by mass and that little spatial variation existed between indoor and outdoor concentrations of PM2.5(ratio of 0.80). PM,., personal exposure monitoring of an aged population was determined to be feasible with some individuals measured at levels approaching 60 pg/m' under certain activity profiles. Correlation of the average PM,.5personal exposure to the outdoor PM2.5 measure was r'=0.4521 (P=0.0472,n=9).
This is a proposed abstract and does not necessarily reflect U.S. Environmental Protection Agency policy.