Identification of Urban Risk Areas by Prevalence Rates in the Child Population and Environmental Indicators

Introduction: Adverse health effects of environmental factors in the urban population are the focus of many foreign and domestic studies.

Objective: To improve methodological approaches to identifying urban risk areas based on environmental indicators and prevalence rates in the child population.

Materials and methods: The territory of the Voronezh city district was chosen as the object of the research. The subject of the study was data on environmental conditions, including ambient air pollution (i.e. levels of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, nitrogen dioxide, lead, formaldehyde, total suspended particles (TSP), phenol, benzene, styrene, and soot), drinking water quality in the centralized domestic and drinking water supply system (boron, iron, manganese, fluorine nitrates, and total hardness), soil pollution in the residential area (benzo[a]pyrene, cadmium, manganese, copper, nickel, mercury, lead, and zinc), and prevalence rates in the child population in terms of medical attendance for the years 2022–2024 retrieved from statistical reports of health facilities included in the regional information fund of public health surveillance.

Results: We propose the algorithm for identifying urban risk territories based on environmental indicators and prevalence rates in the child population that includes the following stages: 1) preparation of primary data on urban territories; 2) construction of a factor – prevalence correlation matrix; 3) normalization of indicators; 4) determination of significance of each factor contributing to the prevalence rate and integral risk indicator; 5) construction of a multidimensional model of the risk indicator given the weighting coefficients; and 6) identification of territories with the highest integral risk indicator.

The priority risk factors for children’s health include the levels of carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, and TSP in ambient air and those of lead and zinc in soil, which is confirmed by statistically significant coefficients of paired correlation ranging from 0.61 to 0.79 and determination coefficients ranging from 36.8 to 62.3 %.

Conclusion: Based on a set of indicators, 2 out of 11 urban areas are characterized by a high level of risk (the integral risk varying from 0.88 to 1, which indicates the predominance of a combination of higher values of unfavorable statistically significant environmental factors compared with other areas).

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