Estimating the health burden of ambient fine particulate matter in Korea

Korea has been making efforts to reduce the PM2.5 concentration through policy intervention but the PM2.5 level still belongs to a lower group among OECD countries. The aim of this study is to thus to evaluate the cases of premature deaths due to PM2.5 levels in Korea using AirQ+ model. We also examined the effect of reducing the burden of disease according to the current level of PM2.5 and future reduction targets in Korea. The burden of disease analysis of PM2.5 was based on cases of premature death of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), stroke, ischemic heart disease (IHD), acute lower respiratory disease (ALRI), and lung cancer (LC). For the scenario, the current PM2.5 conc. of 25㎍/㎥, and the future reduction targets of 17㎍/㎥ and 15㎍/㎥ were applied. Also, Statistics Korea’s population and baseline mortality data by disease were used. The premature deaths of the five diseases due to the current and future PM2.5 scenarios in Korea were calculated as 12826, 12808, and 13223, respectively. The increase of premature deaths cases due to aging in the future population offset the effect of improving PM2.5, and thus the actual number of deaths did not decrease. However, the contribution rates of PM2.5 to the premature death cases decreased to 15.8%, 12.2%, and 11% as the concentration improved. In particular, the concentration rate of PM2.5 in ALRI, COPD, and LC decreased by more than 5%. In conclusion, it could be more effective to estimate the contribution rate rather than the absolute death case for the health improvement effect due to the reduction of PM2.5 in the case of countries where aging is expected in the future. In addition, this study showed that the reduction of PM2.5 in Korea was slightly more effective in reducing premature death of respiratory disease than cardiovascular disease.