The Effects of Short-Term Exposure to Air Pollution on Mortality Rates: The Case of Six Metropolitan Areas in Iran

This paper studies the short-term impacts of air pollutants on mortality rates in a range of diseases including cardiovascular, respiratory and digestive diseases, tumors and cancers. It uses daily data of suspended particulate matters (SPM), CO, NOx, and O3 in six metropolitan areas of Tehran, Ahvaz, Mashhad, Tabriz, Shiraz, and Esfahan during 2011-2015. In order to determine the impact of air pollution on mortality rate, both daily air pollution and its average over the past two weeks is used. In this research, no association was found between daily pollution and mortality rate. However, the results show that increasing CO in the past two weeks causes a significant increase in mortality rates