Personal exposure assessment in the epidemiology of air pollutants

• air pollution
• epidemiology
• personal exposure

In commenting on our paper published recently in Occupational and Environnmental Medicine,1 Kromhout and van Tongeren admonish us for paying insufficient attention to the earlier literature on occupational pollutant exposures.2 While no doubt an element of their criticism is justified, we feel that the exposure situation for the general public is sufficiently different that it should not be assumed that findings in the occupational environment can necessarily be extrapolated to environmental exposures of the general public. A large component of environmental exposure arises from diffuse sources and may therefore be very spatially homogeneous at locations such as people’s homes which are often relatively remote from outdoor pollution sources.

There has been some controversy in the literature regarding the extent to …