David John Briggs

Imperial College London | Imperial · Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics

This paper presents an assessment of the carbon storage capability of existing and future tree cover in Tasman District as a basis for assessing the contribution of the District;s tree cover to climate chan ge mitigation. Analysis has been done using the Land Cover Database of New Zealand (LCDB) to estimate changing areas of tree cover between 1996...

A gridded global data set at 0.5 degree resolution comprising age structure (age groups 0-14, 15-64, 65+ years) and total and urban populations for decadal years 1970-2100. Data are matched to national population totals and age structure estimates, based on UN World Population Prospects data for historic years, and for four population projections:...

Explanatory paper supporting the deposited data set: A global downscaled age structure data set for assessing human impacts of climate change, 1970-2100, available at: 10.13140/RG.2.2.15429.17124. The paper describes data sources used and methods of compilation and downscaling, gives illustrative outputs from the data and discusses data reliabilit...

Abstract We established air pollution modelling to study particle (PM10) exposures during pregnancy and infancy (1990–1993) through childhood and adolescence up to age ~15 years (1991–2008) for the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents And Children (ALSPAC) birth cohort. For pregnancy trimesters and infancy (birth to 6 months; 7 to 12 months) we used...

The purpose of this document is to explore the existing and potential linkages between “very strong heat stress” and continuation of daily life on the one hand, and migration on the other. Knowledge has advanced over the past five years on climate change, heat increase and extreme heat exposure, while issues related to climate migration in all its...

Increased environmental heat levels as a result of climate change present a major challenge to the health, wellbeing and sustainability of human communities in already hot parts of this planet. This challenge has many facets from direct clinical health effects of daily heat exposure to indirect effects related to poor air quality, poor access to sa...

Thermal physiology science shows the health threats to workers caused by exposure to heat when doing heavy physical labour. Climate change increases environmental heat levels in most of the world and it is a key issue for climate change and health research. Our model links climate and workforce data (current and predicted) and estimates work capaci...

Introduction. While the health effects of air pollution are well-established, there are very few studies looking at very long term follow-up of >25 years and most do not look at more than one exposure time point. Methods. This study investigated modelled air pollution exposures to particulate matter measured as black smoke (BS) in 1971, 1981, 1991...

Ambient heat exposure is a well-known health hazard, which reduces human performance and work capacity at heat levels already common in tropical and subtropical areas. Various health problems have been reported. Increasing heat exposure during the hottest seasons of each year is a key feature of global climate change. Heat exhaustion and reduced hu...

Introduction: Long-term air pollution exposure contributes to mortality but there are few studies examining effects of very long-term (>25 years) exposures. Methods: This study investigated modelled air pollution concentrations at residence for 1971, 1981, 1991 (black smoke (BS) and SO2) and 2001 (PM10) in relation to mortality up to 2009 in 367...

Ambient heat exposure is a well-known health hazard, which reduces human performance and work capacity at heat levels already common in tropical and subtropical areas. Various health problems have been reported. Increasing heat exposure during the hottest seasons of each year is a key feature of global climate change. Heat exhaustion and reduced hu...

An integrated environmental health impact assessment of road transport in New Zealand was carried out, using a rapid assessment. The disease and injury burden was assessed from traffic-related accidents, air pollution, noise and physical (in)activity, and impacts attributed back to modal source. In total, road transport was found to be responsible...

This chapter provides a general introduction to the measurement and modeling of environmental exposures for environmental epidemiological studies, with specific reference to the use of geographical information systems (GIS). It provides an introduction to the general principles of the use of these techniques, and various examples and references.

Understanding the public health implications of chemical contamination of drinking water is important for societies and their decision-makers. The possible population health impacts associated with exposure to disinfection by-products (DBPs) are of particular interest due to their potential carcinogenicity and their widespread occurrence as a resul...

Purpose – The extent to which research into the design and development of environmental health indicators (EHIs) has translated into operational programmes is unclear. The purpose of this paper is to identify EHI initiatives worldwide, distil the EHIs and draw lessons from the experience. Design/methodology/approach – A systematic internet-based r...

Effective interventions require evidence on how individual causal pathways jointly determine disease. Based on the concept of systems epidemiology, this paper develops Diagram-based Analysis of Causal Systems (DACS) as an approach to analyze complex systems, and applies it by examining the contributions of proximal and distal determinants of childh...

Warri and environs in the Niger Delta, in the Southern region of Nigeria. To investigate the burden of respiratory illness in children in the Niger Delta. A cross-sectional survey of 1397 schoolchildren aged 7-14 years in areas of low socio-economic status (SES), using written questionnaires in English based on the International Study of Asthma and...

The potential effects of air pollution are a major concern both in terms of the environment and in relation to human health. In order to support environmental policy, there is a need for accurate measurements of the concentrations of pollutants at high geographical resolution over large regions. However, within such regions, there are likely to be...

Background: Extremely low-frequency magnetic fields are designated as possibly carcinogenic in humans, based on an epidemiologic association with childhood leukemia. Evidence for associations with adult cancers is weaker and inconsistent. Methods: We conducted a case-control study to investigate risks of adult cancers in relation to distance and...

Public concern about possible health effects of EMF radiation from mobile phone masts has led to an increase of epidemiological studies and health risk assessments which, in turn, require adequate methods of exposure estimation. Difficulties in exposure modelling are exacerbated both by the complexity of the propagation processes, and the need to o...

The development of geographical information system techniques has opened up a wide array of methods for air pollution exposure assessment. The extent to which these provide reliable estimates of air pollution concentrations is nevertheless not clearly established. Nor is it clear which methods or metrics should be preferred in epidemiological studi...

Association of childhood respiratory illness with traffic air pollution has been investigated largely in developed but not in developing countries, where pollution levels are often very high. In this study we investigated associations between respiratory health and outdoor and indoor air pollution in schoolchildren 7-14 years of age in low socioeco...

"Estimating attributable cancer incidence around incinerators". rationale, methods, calculation and sensitivity analysis for the estimates of the attributable cancer cases around incinerators.

Policies on waste disposal in Europe are heterogeneous and rapidly changing, with potential health implications that are largely unknown. We conducted a health impact assessment of landfilling and incineration in three European countries: Italy, Slovakia and England. A total of 49 (Italy), 2 (Slovakia), and 11 (England) incinerators were operating...

Substantial policy changes to control obesity, limit chronic disease, and reduce air pollution emissions, including greenhouse gasses, have been recommended. Transportation and planning policies that promote active travel by walking and cycling can contribute to these goals, potentially yielding further co-benefits. Little is known, however, about...

Land-use regression modeling was used to develop maps of annual average black smoke (BS) and sulfur dioxide (SO(2)) concentrations in 1962, 1971, 1981, and 1991 for Great Britain on a 1 km grid for use in epidemiological studies. Models were developed in a GIS using data on land cover, the road network, and population, summarized within circular bu...

Current methods of air pollution modelling do not readily meet the needs of air pollution mapping for short-term (i.e. daily) exposure studies. The main limiting factor is that for those few models that couple with a GIS there are insufficient tools for directly mapping air pollution both at high spatial resolution and over large areas (e.g. city w...

Indoor air pollution from solid fuel use is a significant risk factor for acute lower respiratory infections among children in sub-Saharan Africa. Interventions that promote a switch to modern fuels hold a large health promise, but their effective design and implementation require an understanding of the web of upstream and proximal determinants of...

Table A Descriptive statistics for sociodemographic measures

Table C Mean (SD) distance to nearest radio and TV masts, England and Wales

Fig B Boxplots and histogram of measured power density

Table B Correlations (Spearman’s) between exposure metrics and sociodemographic indicators

Fig A Scattergrams of measured and modelled total power density (dBm)

To investigate the risk of early childhood cancers associated with the mother's exposure to radiofrequency from and proximity to macrocell mobile phone base stations (masts) during pregnancy. Case-control study. Cancer registry and national birth register data in Great Britain. 1397 cases of cancer in children aged 0-4 from national cancer registry...

Many environmental risks are multi-faceted and their health consequences can be far-ranging in both time and space. It can be a challenging task to develop informed policies for such risks. Integrated environmental health impact assessment aims to support policy by assessing environmental health effects in ways that take into account the complexiti...

Exposure to total trihalomethanes in drinking water has been associated with several adverse birth outcomes relating to fetal growth and prematurity. We carried out a systematic review and meta-analysis of epidemiologic studies featuring original peer-reviewed data on the association of total trihalomethane exposure and health outcomes related to f...

Land-use regression models have increasingly been applied for air pollution mapping at typically the city level. Though models generally predict spatial variability well, the structure of models differs widely between studies. The observed differences in the models may be due to artefacts of data and methodology or underlying differences in source...

Achieving effective stakeholder participation in discourses about modern, systemic risks is difficult. Risks and policies to control them stimulate behavioural changes in society, so stakeholdership evolves as events play out, and defining stakeholders requires the ability to model the adaptive responses involved. Engaging stakeholders is also prob...

Stakeholder partnerships have increasingly been used as part of the process of policy debate and decision-making in recent years. By bringing together representatives from different stakeholder communities in an inclusive, sustained and indefinite discourse, they also offer a potentially important means of engaging stakeholders in the full cycle of...

Traffic-related air pollution is related with asthma, and this association may be modified by genetic factors. We investigated the role of genetic polymorphisms potentially modifying the association between home outdoor levels of modeled nitrogen dioxide and asthma. Adults from 13 cities of the second European Community Respiratory Health Survey (E...

A GIS-based moving window approach was developed as a means for generating high resolution air pollution maps over large geographic areas. The approach is demonstrated by modelling annual mean NO(2) pollution for the EU-15 (excluding Sweden) at the 1 km level on the basis of emissions and meteorological data. Models were developed using monitoring...

The aim of our analysis was to study the association between air pollution and asthma among adults. For this goal, a previously developed “asthma score” was used. Persons aged 25–44 yrs were randomly selected (1991–1993) and followed up (2000–2002) within the European Community Respiratory Health Survey (ECRHS I and II, respectively). The asthma sc...

Almost half of global child deaths due to acute lower respiratory infections (ALRIs) occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where three-quarters of the population cook with solid fuels. This study aims to quantify the impact of fuel type and cooking practices on childhood ALRI mortality in Africa, and to explore implications for public health interventions....

There is a need to understand much more about the geographic variation of air pollutants. This requires the ability to extrapolate from monitoring stations to unsampled locations. The aim was to assess methods to develop accurate and high resolution maps of background air pollution across the EU. We compared the validity of ordinary kriging, univer...

To investigate the risk of congenital anomalies in relation to an index of geographic density of landfill sites across 5x5 km grid squares in England. 2 km zones were constructed in a geographical information system around 8804 landfill sites, including 607 that handled special (hazardous) wastes, and intersected with postcode coordinates of over 1...

Background: Few studies have investigated new onset of asthma in adults in relation to air pollution. The aim of this study is to investigate the association between modeled background levels of traffic-related air pollution at the subjects’ home addresses and self-reported asthma incidence in a European adult population. Methods: Adults from the E...

The recent and rapid expansion of occupational and environmental epidemiology and health risk assessment looks set to continue in line with growing public, government, and media concern about occupational and environmental health issues, and a scientific need to better understand and explain the effects of occupational and environmental pollutants...

The recent and rapid expansion of occupational and environmental epidemiology and health risk assessment looks set to continue in line with growing public, government, and media concern about occupational and environmental health issues, and a scientific need to better understand and explain the effects of occupational and environmental pollutants...

Traditional methods of risk assessment have provided good service in support of policy, mainly in relation to standard setting and regulation of hazardous chemicals or practices. In recent years, however, it has become apparent that many of the risks facing society are systemic in nature – complex risks, set within wider social, economic and enviro...

Environmental epidemiology and health risk and impact assessment have long grappled with problems of uncertainty in data and their relationships. These uncertainties have become more challenging because of the complex, systemic nature of many of the risks. A clear framework defining and quantifying uncertainty is needed. Three dimensions characteri...

Recent studies have suggested that more deprived people tend to live in areas characterised by higher levels of environmental pollution. If generally true, these environmental inequities may combine to cause adverse effects on health and also exacerbate problems of confounding in epidemiological studies. Previous studies of environmental inequity h...

Studies on the health effects of long-term average exposure to outdoor air pollution have played an important role in recent health impact assessments. Exposure assessment for epidemiological studies of long-term exposure to ambient air pollution remains a difficult challenge because of substantial small-scale spatial variation. Current approaches...

Radon gas occurs naturally in the environment with variable distribution, concentrating sufficiently in the built environment in some areas to pose a public health risk. Radon levels can be successfully reduced in affected buildings, and large-scale remediation programmes have been justified in terms of accrued costs and benefits. We present result...

Annoyance caused by air pollution has been proposed as an indicator of exposure to air pollution. The aim of this study was to assess the geographical homogeneity of the relationship between annoyance and modelled home-based nitrogen dioxide (NO2) measurements. The European Community Respiratory Health Survey II was conducted in 2000-1, in 25 Europ...