Evaluation of the genotoxic potential of air pollution in workers exposed to vehicular emissions from Avenida Radial Leste, São Paulo

Abstract

Currently there are strong evidences that chronic exposure to air pollution is associated with increased of mortality due to respiratory, cardiovascular, infectious diseases, lung cancer, and morbidity with exacerbation in patients with chronic diseases such as asthma, DPOC, cardiac, rhinitis and other. Several studies have shown that people who most suffer from the effects of air pollution are precisely those with lower income, lower education level and that live in the peripheral regions of the cities. The same scenario is found in São Paulo, where due the conventional monitoring of air quality through automatic stations has a high cost of implementation and maintenance the air quality monitoring becoming insufficient against the growth of urban occupation. For this reason, the peripheral regions are devoid of air quality monitoring, which acquired greater relevance since these are usually the most densely populated areas, lacking of the infrastructure and where travels the most older vehicles that are the most polluters. An example of the lack of environmental monitoring in the city occurs in the object of this study: Radial Leste Avenue, it has 23 km with about 44,000 vehicles automotive circulating daily and, passes through neighborhoods with very different socioeconomic characteristics. Therefore the automatic environmental monitoring in the region (two air quality monitoring stations in operation) cannot provide sufficient data to characterize the quality of air of this region becoming difficult evaluate the effects of the air pollutants exposition on the population health. In this scenario the use of alternative methods able of identify and quantify in micro scale to the extent of contamination can contribute to understand of the role of air pollution on local health. To characterization and identification the emission sources in Radial Leste Avenue region we will use the technique Energy Dispersive X Ray Fluorescence (EDX) to determine the bioaccumulation of the elements markers of contamination of atmospheric in samples of leaves and barks of trees. The EDX has a high potential for application in toxicology and environmental studies, where there is need of correlation between essential and toxic elements. However it is a recent analytical technique and its use in analysis in biological matrix (animal and plant tissue) is not widely used, sample preparation and analysis methodology are not fully established. For this reason we propose the internship of the student Douglas Rene Rocha Silva in partnership with the only one of the research centers that already has experience in using this methodology, in order to standardize the technique EDX for analysis in samples biological matrix. (AU)