Airport Air Pollution Surveillance System for Public Health
This paper develops a surveillance system for the environmental health concern of air pollution generated by major airport hubs. It examines how aircraft emissions — including carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and hydrocarbons — affect environmental health, public health, and surrounding communities. Drawing on sources from the World Health Organization, the Environmental Protection Agency, and peer-reviewed research, the paper outlines a three-part surveillance framework covering hazard, exposure, and health-effect monitoring. It also reviews existing tools such as the National Air Toxics Assessment and the Toxic Release Inventory, acknowledges limitations in current monitoring capabilities, and discusses how stakeholders across government, transportation, agriculture, and healthcare can collaborate to reduce air pollution over the long term.
- Introduction: Defines environmental health and introduces airport air pollution surveillance
- Airport Air Pollution and Environmental Health Impacts: Describes emissions, health risks, and environmental impact
- Public Health and Community Consequences: Links air pollution to disease, community burden, and clean air access
- The Surveillance System Framework: Outlines three-part hazard, exposure, and health-effect monitoring system
- Types of Surveillance Needed: Reviews monitoring networks, EPA tools, and data limitations
- Stakeholder Roles in Prevention: Examines legislation, energy, agriculture, and healthcare responsibilities
- Conclusion: Summarizes findings and calls for broad lifestyle and policy change
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper moves logically from defining the problem to constructing a practical solution, making its argument easy to follow and its purpose clear throughout.
- It grounds claims in authoritative sources — including the WHO, EPA, and peer-reviewed journals — lending credibility to its surveillance recommendations.
- The paper honestly acknowledges system limitations (estimation models, threshold-based reporting) rather than overstating what the proposed framework can achieve.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates applied policy analysis: it does not merely describe a problem but constructs a structured, multi-component solution. By breaking the surveillance system into hazard, exposure, and health-effect components, the author shows how abstract public health principles translate into actionable monitoring protocols — a technique common in environmental health and public policy writing.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a broad definition of environmental health before narrowing to airport air pollution as its specific case. It then dedicates separate sections to environmental, public health, and community impacts before presenting the surveillance framework. A section on stakeholder responsibilities broadens the scope again before the conclusion synthesizes the argument. This funnel-and-widen structure is well suited to applied health policy papers.
Introduction
Environmental health is an important concern for healthcare providers because it encompasses the areas of human health that are affected by external factors such as chemical agents, biological agents, the physical environment, and related hazards. Issues that fall under environmental health include air pollution, water pollution, pesticides, chemical spills, and other areas (Laroque, 2009). Because of the risk these areas pose to human health, there is a need to monitor environmental health conditions closely. One major area of environmental health that urgently requires surveillance is the quality of air in urban areas near major airports. As Schlenker and Walker (2015) point out, airports are responsible for some of the highest concentrations of air pollution in the nation. And as West et al. (2016) show, air pollution causes millions of premature deaths across the globe. There is therefore tremendous reason to be more diligent about monitoring how much air pollution one of the most widely used forms of travel is generating.
This paper develops a surveillance system for the environmental health concern of air pollution at airport hubs. It describes how this source of air pollution affects environmental health, public health, and communities. It explains the types of surveillance needed for this environmental problem and discusses how various stakeholders can help prevent this problem from occurring in the future.
Airport Air Pollution and Environmental Health Impacts
Airport air pollution requires surveillance because it affects the lives of countless travelers and creates a concentration of pollution near where many people live. Aircraft release significant amounts of pollution into the air, including carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide (CO), and hydrocarbons — all of which make the air unfit to breathe (Schlenker & Walker, 2015). It is especially important to monitor air pollution emanating from airports because neighboring communities, including those that are downwind from airports, are likely to be negatively affected by the high volumes of air pollution released from these hubs of traffic.
Klepac, Locatelli, Korosec, Kunzli, and Kukec (2018) have found that air pollution can be particularly damaging for pregnant mothers, resulting in a greater risk of preterm birth. Preterm births can have serious consequences for both the mother and the child. Air pollution can also harm children and impair their development, lead to respiratory issues, and cause further complications (Simeonova, Currie, Nilsson, & Walker, 2018). The World Health Organization has classified air pollution as a cancer-causing agent that leads to lung and bladder cancer in people who regularly breathe in air pollutants (Simon, 2013). Those individuals living in communities near airports are therefore at significant risk of contracting illnesses and cancer as a result of their exposure to the pollutants emitted by airplane engines and exhaust. The environmental health of these populations is negatively affected by busy airports, and without monitoring of the amount of pollution displaced by these facilities, the health of surrounding communities is placed at further risk.
Public Health and Community Consequences
Air pollution is a major public health concern, as the World Health Organization (WHO) has demonstrated. The WHO (2013) has classified air pollution as carcinogenic — essentially a poison — and therefore unfit to be breathed by people. Yet people everywhere are forced to breathe toxic air because of the modern modes of travel that have become so prevalent in societies around the world. Kelly and Fussell (2015) note that improvements in the quality of air that people breathe must be pursued, as air pollution is responsible for many diseases that researchers are only now beginning to understand as being connected to poor air quality. Air pollution is thus an environmental health issue that negatively affects public health and must be monitored in order to be controlled.
Communities can benefit from easy access to travel, which air transport affords, but they are negatively affected by the air pollution that accompanies it. Communities that suffer from air pollution are likely to experience poor health outcomes, and communities in poor health impose greater costs of care on the state, contributing less to society overall. To ensure that communities have the best chances of flourishing, they must have access to clean air and a strong foundation for good health. If air quality around airports is not monitored, communities risk being overlooked while their children and adults continue to suffer from pollution that could be controlled. Monitoring air pollution from aircraft is therefore an environmental health issue that must be addressed for the sake of communities everywhere.
Conclusion
Air pollution is responsible for harming the health of people the world over. The World Health Organization classifies air pollution as carcinogenic, and it has been linked to causing cancer. Monitoring air pollution at high-concentration areas like airports is important because surrounding communities are likely to be negatively affected by the concentrated levels of pollutants resulting from aircraft emissions. To be sure, aircraft are not the number-one source of air pollution — that distinction belongs to the agriculture industry. What that fact reveals, however, is that if stakeholders in public health want to safeguard the future and engage seriously with environmental health, major lifestyle changes will be needed across the board.
References
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Klepac, P., Locatelli, I., Korošec, S., Künzli, N., & Kukec, A. (2018). Ambient air pollution and pregnancy outcomes: A comprehensive review and identification of environmental public health challenges. Environmental Research, 167, 144–159.
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