Poor air quality issue raised at environmental health day

The issue of poor air quality has been raised at the first ever World Environmental Health Day.

According to the Northern Ireland Executive, it is doing all it can to reduce the impact of air pollution on people's health.

Support for an improvement to inner-city air quality has been growing since a Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH) report showed that pollution is responsible for an estimated eight month reduction in life expectancy across the UK.

Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph, Gary McFarlane, director of CIEH Northern Ireland, said: "We want to highlight the negative impact poor air quality can have on our societies' wellbeing, particularly in the cases of children and people with respiratory ill-health."

He added that new and innovative means of boosting city air quality were required and suggested that increasing levels of home working could be one of the simplest ways to achieve pollution reduction goals.

Recently, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published a report which showed that exposure to high levels of pollution can increase a person's risk of having a heart attack.

Posted by Lauren Steadman