The REC project 'Indoor Air Quality in European Schools: Preventing and reducing respiratory diseases' seeks to directly address CEHAPE Regional Priority Goal 3. The project involves REC offices in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovakia, together with related organisations in these countries, and in Austria, Italy, and Norway.
The project period is 2005-09, and final findings will be presented in 2009 at the Fifth Ministerial Conference on Environment and Health, to be held in Italy.
Working under the Italian Health Ministry's 'Guidelines for the Safety and Promotion of Health Indoors,' published in November 2001 in the Official Journal of Environment and Health, the project began as a pilot programme in Hungary.
In 2004, REC Hungary employed the Italian model for improving indoor air quality in schools. The pilot training programme was developed by several teachers from Hungary, together with Italian and Hungarian medical consultants.
According to the 2006-07 programme itinerary, the project was kicked off in eight countries, as was requisite planning and training courses based on the Italian-Hungarian concept. The all-important measurement of indoor air pollutants within schools started in November 2006, and will continue through March 2007. By the end of the year, a questionnaire will be distributed in selected schools for measuring the representative health 100 children per country, followed by collection and analysis of the results.
The programme will continue next year, and the REC hopes that the Hungarian-Italian model will be propagated throughout the eight participating countries.
Progress is steadily being made in this area of environmental improvement. The early success of the REC's 'Indoor Air Quality in European Schools' project is but one outcome of CEHAPE Regional Priority Goal 3. The latest large-scale defining of goals in particulate matter-related, health-risk management was the Thematic Strategy on Air Pollution, part of the EU's Sixth Environmental Action Programme.
Past projects took on new directions under an EC directive issued in September 2005, which promised to "cut the annual number of premature deaths from air pollution-related diseases by almost 40 percent from the 2000 level."
The good news is that particulate matter emissions actually do seem to be on the wane. The "ambitious" goals set in the Thematic Strategy will, by present calculations, be reached. Meanwhile, particulate pollution from the troublesome internal combustion engine will be diminished somewhat on the continent, as the European Union recently introduced a more stringent standard of 0.025 grams per kilometer (0.04 grams per mile) in particulate emissions from light-duty vehicles.
While we're still some — perhaps, many — years away from running industrial machinery at sufficiently clean levels, we can eventually win the battle on the microscopic level of particulate matter; and this should make us, and our little ones, breathe easier.
