Brown Coal and Logwood Combustion in a Modern Heating Appliance: The Impact of Combustion Quality and Fuel on Organic Aerosol Composition.

Residential heating with solid fuels is one of the major drivers for poor air quality in Central and Eastern Europe, and coal is still one of the major fuels in countries, such as Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. In this work, emissions from a single-room heater fueled with brown coal briquettes (BCBs) and spruce logs (SLs) were analyzed for signatures of inorganic as well as semivolatile aromatic and low-volatile organic constituents. High variations in organic carbon (OC) emissions of BCB emissions, ranging from 5 to 22 mg MJ, were associated to variations in carbon monoxide (CO) emissions, ranging from 900 to 1900 mg MJ.

Practical Opportunities to Improve the Impact of Health Risk Assessment on Environmental and Public Health Decisions.

Following alerts about the diminishing role of health risk assessment (HRA) in informing public health decisions, this study examines specific HRA topics with the aim of identifying possible solutions for addressing this compelling situation. The study administered a survey among different groups of stakeholders involved in HRA or decision-making, or both. The responses show various understandings of HRA in the decision-making context-including confusion with the health impact assessment (HIA)-and confirm recurring foundational issues within the risk analysis field that contribute to the growth of inconsistency in the HRA praxis.

Human Biomonitoring Data in Health Risk Assessments Published in Peer-Reviewed Journals between 2016 and 2021: Confronting Reality after a Preliminary Review.

Human biomonitoring (HBM) is a rapidly developing field that is emphasized as an important approach for the assessment of health risks. However, its value for health risk assessment (HRA) remains to be clarified. We performed a review of publications concerned with applications of HBM in the assessment of health risks.

Demonstrating the use of a framework for risk-informed decisions with stakeholder engagement through case studies for NORM and nuclear legacy sites.

The international community has come a long way in developing a consensus that the remediation and management of naturally occurring radioactive materials and nuclear legacy sites will benefit from the use of the framework for risk-informed decision-making. Such a framework should ideally integrate risk assessment and decision-making. The framework presented in this paper specifically addresses the needs and expectations in the wider socio-economic and environmental context, as well as a narrower human health context.

Evaluating the success of Slovenia's policy on the health of children and adolescents: results of an audit.

Objectives: The aims of this audit were twofold: (1) to demonstrate the contribution of the auditing process in evaluating the success of child and adolescent health policy in Slovenia between 2012 and 2019, and (2) to expand on the commentary published in the International Journal of Public Health in 2019 to demonstrate the benefits of auditing in improving public health policy in general.

Methods: The audit followed health, safety and environmental approaches as per the standards of public health policy.

Results: Due to poor intersectoral coordination and weak associations between environmental and health indicators, no clear evidence could be established that child and adolescent health policy contributed to positive changes in child and adolescent health from 2012 to 2019.

Sea surface microplastics in Slovenian part of the Northern Adriatic.

Plastics are the most common material of marine litter and have become a global pollution concern. They are persistent in the environment where they gradually degrade into increasingly smaller particles-microplastics (MP). Our study presents results of sea-surface monitoring for MP in the Slovenian part of the Trieste Bay in the Northern Adriatic Sea.