High levels of indoor fine particulate matter during the cold season in Almaty prompt urgent public health action.

Introduction: Almaty is the largest city of Kazakhstan with extreme air pollution, mostly in the cold season, but little is known whether staying indoors could lessen the exposure. The aim was to quantitatively characterize indoor fine PM levels and to verify the contribution of ambient pollution to it in a polluted city like Almaty.

Methods: We collected forty-six 24-hour 15-min average samples of the ambient air and a similar number of paired indoor samples (total 92 samples).

Occupational Burden of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease in the Commonwealth of Independent States: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

Population-based studies from the Russian Federation and neighboring countries on the occupational burden of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are seldom or not included in the systematic reviews. The aim of this review was to summarize published population-based studies from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in order to ascertain the occupational burden of COPD. We systematically searched www.