Municipalities should be required to start measuring air quality in certain preschools. This is according to researchers who have discovered harmful levels of air pollution in preschools in traffic-exposed environments.
Thomas Hellsten, principal and educator at Preschool Elvan in central Stockholm, welcomes air meters on his farm.
– I would like to see such meters on all farms in the inner city, he says.
Small children are extra sensitive to air pollution. But despite this, there are no guidelines for monitoring air quality at preschools.
– I think it is bad, I think it needs to be legislated around this.
Emilie Stroh is a researcher in environment and occupational medicine at Lund University. She has through a survey among Sweden’s municipalities recently discovered that the municipalities today have poor control of the air quality in the preschool yards. Just over 10 percent of the municipalities have ever measured the air quality at a preschool.
The air has improved in our cities for the past 50 years, and in Sweden the air is also cleaner than in many other places.
But the particle holder which Emilie Stroh and her colleagues themselves have measured at a number of traffic-prone preschools in Malmö, shows, among other things, levels that can be linked to an increased risk of developing asthma and chronic bronchitis and that children there risk poorer lung function in adulthood.
The city of Stockholm has recently made general calculations of the air quality in the whole municipality but just like most municipalities in the country they did not make any specific measurements on the preschools.
– This is the most vulnerable group and it is a group that is growing, especially city children. We must have control over the children’s indoor and outdoor environments.
Source: ICELAND NEWS