Notice of RetractionAir Quality Trends and Potential Health Effects: Development of an Aggregate Risk Index

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE\´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

The recognized health effects of air pollution include the increased risk of the hospital admissions and mortality for respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. The "Provence Alpes Cote d\´Azur" region, in the South East of France, is influenced by the atmospheric pollution. The senior and children vulnerabilities with large hazards of pollution lead to serious sanitary concerns. During the last 15 years, industrial emissions decreased, but the atmospheric pollution is more and more influenced by the road traffic. The trends study, with the Mann Kendall test, showed an increase for ozone and PM10 concentrations over the 1990-2005 period. The other pollutants concentration showed a downward trend reflecting the reduction policy of the emissions. In parallel, we obtained decreasing trends for Asthma, Cardiovascular, Ischemic and Cerebrovascular diseases. For "Other heart" and "Respiratory" diseases an increase was observed. For the "Respiratory diseases", we noted a gender-related difference and a significant difference is observed for the number of deaths for cerebrovascular, heart and cardiovascular diseases. Different pollutants have different health endpoints. The Aggregate Risk Index is based on the relative risk of the well-established increased daily mortality/morbidity associated with short-term exposure to common air pollutants. The ARI, developed per pathology, takes into account the possible adverse effects associated with the coexistence of all pollutants. This index will enable to communicate the health- risks associated.