Exposure to indoor mould and children's respiratory health in the PATY study.

Background: Living in a damp or mouldy home reportedly damages children's respiratory health, yet mould appears not to be a prominent risk factor in the public's perception. Analyses of data on over 58,000 children from the Pollution and the Young (PATY) study are presented. In this collaboration, researchers from 12 cross-sectional studies pooled their data to assess the effects of air quality on a spectrum of children's respiratory disorders.

International study of temperature, heat and urban mortality: the 'ISOTHURM' project.

Background: This study describes heat- and cold-related mortality in 12 urban populations in low- and middle-income countries, thereby extending knowledge of how diverse populations, in non-OECD countries, respond to temperature extremes.

Methods: The cities were: Delhi, Monterrey, Mexico City, Chiang Mai, Bangkok, Salvador, São Paulo, Santiago, Cape Town, Ljubljana, Bucharest and Sofia. For each city, daily mortality was examined in relation to ambient temperature using autoregressive Poisson models (2- to 5-year series) adjusted for season, relative humidity, air pollution, day of week and public holidays.

Parental smoking and children's respiratory health: independent effects of prenatal and postnatal exposure.

Objectives: Adverse effects have been reported of prenatal and/or postnatal passive exposure to smoking on children's health. Uncertainties remain about the relative importance of smoking at different periods in the child's life. We investigate this in a pooled analysis, on 53,879 children from 12 cross-sectional studies--components of the PATY study (Pollution And The Young).

Mortality and temperature in Sofia and London.

Study Objective: Heat and cold have been associated with increased mortality, independently of seasonal trends, but details are little known. This study explores associations between mortality and temperature in two European capitals-Sofia and London-using four years of daily deaths, air pollution, and weather data.

Design: Generalised additive models were used to permit non-linear modelling of confounders such as season and humidity, and to show the shape of mortality-temperature relations-using both two day and two week average temperatures separately.

Nutrition and respiratory health in children in six Central and Eastern European countries.

Background: The results of studies on the effect of nutrition on respiratory diseases are inconsistent. The role of nutrition in children's respiratory health was therefore analysed within the cross sectional Central European Study on Air Pollution and Respiratory Health (CESAR).

Method: A total of 20 271 children aged 7-11 were surveyed in six European countries.