Air Pollution and Respiratory Health in Megacity Delhi, India

Pramila Goyal; Saurabh Kumarb

Pramila Goyal Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Northcap University, India.
Saurabh Kumarb Center for Atmospheric Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India.

Abstract

Pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) and COPD are major public health problems in
Delhi, India. Delhi has a very high number of monthly PTB and COPD clinic visits
and it is also known for its severe air quality status. We investigated the general
impact of different kinds of pollutants on PTB and COPD over time by analyzing
the variation in monthly clinic visits in respiratory disease hospital during 2012 to
2016. We used the generalized additive regression model to determine the
monthly periodicity of PTB and air quality in a time series, as well as assessing the
relationships between meteorological variables and monthly PTB clinic visits.
Meteorological parameter maximum temperature exhibited significant positive
correlation (r=0.303; p <0.05), and NO2 has significant negative correlation
(r=−0.4; p <0.01) with the monthly count of morbidity due to TB and COPD.
Generalized additive model (GAM) involving PM 2.5, PM 10 and maximum
temperature as parametric smooth term explain 69.6% variation in morbidity
count with adjusted R2 of 0.43. Similarly, GAM comprising CO, O3 and Maximum
Temperature as parametric smooth term explain 69.6 % deviance with adjusted R2
as 0.45. GAM containing two-way interactive parametric term of PM 2.5 and PM
10 along with meteorological variable maximum temperature explained maximum
deviance 77.3% among all models in the monthly morbidity count.

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