The use of socio-economic deprivation indices in analysis of routinely collected mortality data in public health might help to explain health inequalities.

SUMMARY Background and Aim:The city of Ostrava and its surroundings belong to the most long-therm polluted areas in the Czech Republic and Europe. For identification of health risk, the World Health Organization recommends a theoretical estimation of increased short-term PM 10 concentrations effect on hospital admissions for cardiac complaints based on a 0.6% increase per 10 µg.m −3 PM 10 and 1.14% increase for respiratory causes. The goal of the present study is to verify the percentage increase of morbidity due to cardiovascular and respiratory causes, as per WHO recommendations for health risk assessment, in the population of Ostrava.Method: The input data include data on PM 10 air pollution, meteorologi cal data, the absolute number of hospital admissions for acute cardiovascular and respiratory diseases in the period 2010-2012. To examine the association between air pollution and health outcomes the time series Poisson regression adjusted for covari ates was used.Results: A significant relationship was found between the cardiovascular hospital admissions (percentage increase of 1.24% per 10 µg.m −3 ) and values of PM 10 less than 150 μg.m −3 in the basic model, although after adjustment for other factors, this relationship was no longer significant. A significant relationship was also observed for respiratory causes of hospital admissions in the basic model. Contrary to cardiovascular hospitalization, the relationship between respiratory hospital admissions and PM 10 values below 150 μg.m −3 (percentage increase of 1.52%) remained statistically significant after adjustment for other factors.Conclusions: The observed significant relationship between hospital admissions for respiratory causes was consistent with the results of large European and American studies.

No abstract

SUMMARYAim: This study is concerned with environmental health studies conducted in Ostrava (Czech Republic) and the surrounding region since the early nineties.Methods: Various databases, journals and reports, including internal or unpublished reports, were reviewed to assess the individual publications. A brief description of the studies and main results were collated.Results: The city of Ostrava and the surrounding region is an important industrial centre in the Czech Republic with a long-term heavy environmental and occupational disease burden. In spite of the theoretically assessed decline of health risks related to decreasing concentrations of compounds in the environment in recent years, it still poses a disproportionally high risk for the city residents. There are a number of studies suggesting supportive evidence, but they are highly variable in their approach to this topic resulting in a high uncertainty of observed associations and consistency of results. Most of the studies were focused on specific contexts, without any relation to environmental factors.Conclusions: A more systematic approach is needed to assess environmental health burden of diseases especially in relation to air pollution, based on the prospective cohort study, that would lead to sufficient new evidence for accurate and updated description of the environmental health burden in Ostrava.

No abstract