Whether research has been completed, or is in the process of being conducted, into the levels of respiratory diseases in the local communit…

The Committee onthe Medical Effects of Air Pollutants has considered reports on two separatestudies on The Acute Effects of Air Pollution on the Respiratory Health ofChildren in West Glamorgan (1997) and on Do particulates from opencast coal mining impair children's respiratoryhealth (1999), produced respectivelyby the Welsh Combined Centres for Public Health and researchers from theUniversity of Newcastle. On the first of these, the committeeconcluded that the report did not support the assertion that asthma was morecommon in an area close to the opencast coal mine under study. On the second,the cmmittee concluded that the respiratory health of children living incommunities close to open-ast sites was very similar to that of children livingin communities distant from such sites.
The results ofthese studies are openly available and there are no plans to place them in the Parliament’s Reference Centre.