engleski

Industrial Emissions asS Risk Factors for the Development of Environmental Diseases

Urban air pollution is a grave problem in majority of metropolises, which contain high levels of traffic congestion generating great amounts of genotoxic substances. The contribution of such environmental exposure to develop COPD is marked. Benzene is one of the most important air pollutants that are emitted by oil industry, since they are involved in almost every refinery process. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are a major group of air pollutants and play a crucial role in ecological damages, disturbing the ecosystem and human health. The variability of pollutants is an important factor in determining human exposure to these chemicals. It is noticed that the blood-air relationships of benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and the xylenes (BTEX) were dependent by smoking, exposure-smoking interactions, and by gender and age, while the other VOCs were not. There are many evidences that indoor volatile organic compounds (VOCs) have been associated with asthma, but there is a very little studies with the interactions between ambient exposure and respiratory health and exhaled breath VOCs, which is a biomarker of VOC exposure. The objectives of this study was to determine the health impacts of these industrial pollutants which were assessed with spyrometric dynamic and static tests of inhabitants living in industrial areas, compared with those living in rural ones. People living in urban industrial fields have significantly decreased values of PIF (inspiratory peak flow), FIVC (inspiratory forced vital capacity), FIV1 (volume inspired in the first second of the test) and FVC (forced vital capacity) and significantly increased the concentration of o-ksilen, benzene, toluene and etilbenzene. We were found that significantly increased BTEX values were associated with the altered spyrometry's findings in inhabitants from urban areas, suggesting the great role of industrial emission on COPD and point to the possible predictive role of BTEX measuring in these subjects.

BTEX; environmental factors; respiratory changes

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