Public Health Initiative on LMIC Air Pollution (PHILAP)

The PHILAP proposal brings together a multidisciplinary team with a range of expertise to bear on the problem of health effects of air pollution in Delhi, India which is not only a critical case but also a microcosm of a wider global health concern in low and middle income countries, tied up with questions of social justice and equity. In particular, PHILAP seeks to characterise the burden of asthma in adolescents living in the slums of Delhi - a marginalised section of the population who have dropped out of the school system and are engaged in ad-hoc work in the informal sector. PHILAP will employ state-of-the-art miniature wearable sensors currently deployed in Delhi in the MRC-/NERC-funded (2016-21) DAPHNE (Delhi Air Pollution: Health and Effects) as part of the Air Pollution and Human Health (APHH) - Delhi programme, to measure actual personal exposure to particulate pollution and contemporaneously recording its physiological effects, such as changes in the respiratory rate/flow and physical activity levels, with the aim of correlating disease control of asthma with air pollution exposure. These measurements will be situated, and made sense of, in the social and cultural contexts of people's everyday lives through ethnographic fieldwork and interviews. By engaging the ethnographic data in dialogue with the scientific data of urban air pollution and exposure and its clinical effects, we hope to unpick the multiple strands in the entwined health dimensions of breathing and living with air pollution. PHILAP will harness these vast data-sets, produced and mobilised across the work-packages, into a series of public facing visual narratives that seek to foster dialogue at the interface of science, arts and humanities research.

the PHILAP project will benefit young asthmatics living in the margins of society, public health practitioners and policy makers and the general public by developing creative ways in which scientific information on the insidious health effects of air pollution can be communicated effectively to the intended audiences.
PHILAP will contribute directly to the public health concern of air pollution in Delhi by providing knowledge about social practices and human behaviours that influence exposure, and an empirical understanding of the cultural dynamics that shape environmental health.
PHILAP will probe the asthma burden of disease among vulnerable populations and uncover feasible approaches to mitigating adolescent asthma in Delhi. In the process, PHILAP will expand the current evidence-base on the social inequalities of the short-term health effects of exposure to air pollution in Delhi. It will both highlight the social distribution of exposure and harm, whilst illuminating the socio-geographic contexts and circumstances that influence increased health risk. This information will impact on the nuanced distribution of scarce resources by public health planners when formulating future policies. The targeting by PHILAP of marginalised young asthmatics school dropouts working in the informal sector will be of particular interest to policy makers addressing development questions of social justice and equity.

PHILAP employs novel methods to gather contemporaneous personal exposure and respiratory data continuously at a higher temporal resolution than hitherto possible, and a framework to link this personal sensor information with clinical, and socio-cultural data which will be a useful tool for public health research and management.

The arts and humanities contribution of the project will develop novel ways of re-presenting the research findings by focusing on ways of effectively translating between science and its public. The project will seek to integrate the socio-cultural histories, experiences and understanding of exposure into the medical and public health science of air pollution. The project will both provide specific findings that can inform policy in the study country, and develop methodological frameworks that can be used by other interdisciplinary research teams and non-academic research organisations, thus informing the wider global health agenda.

adolescents and their coping strategies for different socio-economic segments in Delhi. We will draw on our experience of working with public health initiatives at UNICEF to devise a strategy for translating the Delhi outputs to a selection of LMIC countries in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and South America. The use of visual narratives such as animation sequences, picture books and infographics will make information accessible to a wider audience and invite debate and reflexive actions. A key aspect of the design approach would be easy translation of the outp