Assessing health impact of environmental pollution sources using space-time models

We used disease mapping for health impact assessment of the national airport of the Netherlands. Spatio-temporal models were used to relate hospital discharge data for acute myocardial infarction and bronchitis in 1991, 1992 and 1993 to noise and distance from the airport. To compare models a discrepancy measure (expected predictive deviance) proposed by Carlin and Louis was used. The best fitting model was the most general one with inclusion of spatial and temporal components. Results on the effects of the covariates noise and distance from the airport were somewhat inconsistent between men and women and between the two diseases: for women no association between bronchitis and distance from the airport was found, whereas for men no association between acute myocardial infarction and noise was found. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.