IMPACCT
One of 12 BMBF funded "Junior Research Groups Global Change: Climate, Environment and Health" comes to Augsburg.
Environmental Medicine Augsburg (IEM/Helmholtz Munich at the University Hospital Augsburg (UKA), headed by Prof. Dr. med. Traidl-Hoffmann, has won funding within the initiative "Nachwuchsgruppen Globaler Wandel: Klima, Umwelt und Gesundheit" of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in January 2023.?
Over the next five years, with the help of the BMBF funding of more than 1 million EUR, the junior research group IMPACCT will use the latest technologies in particle detection and big data management to better understand the complex relationships between pollen concentration in the atmosphere, its distribution in different environments and the symptoms of people suffering from allergy in a changing environment.
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Climate change increasingly affects people’s health, as do other global environmental changes such as loss of biodiversity. New environmental, climatic and health issues that affect a large proportion of the world's population are emerging and require rapid identification and response. Specifically, environmental allergy caused by different particles has been increasing in frequency and severity in recent decades; hence, it has been categorized as a major global epidemic. At IEM, special attention is given to this impact and to the need to develop resilience and adaptation strategies.
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Maria Plaza
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Real-time data and sophisticated analysis are essential for being able to cope with the situation. Current approaches have laid the foundation but have not proven sufficient to provide efficient and real-time information on environmental health risks seen from a climate change perspective, as well as to help build environments that support and enable health.
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The new young research group fills this gap. Led by Dr. Maria P. Plaza, the group will work on opportunities to improve climate resilience at different points.
The proposed research attempts to give an answer to the fundamental questions:
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- What are the effects climate change has on pollen allergy in humans?
- How do changing atmospheric conditions affect the particles present in the air and biodiversity?
- Which spatial patterns affect how people experience the effects of climate change on pollen production?
- Which factors do increase the risk of asthma exacerbations? Could we prevent them?
- How can – at the individual and institutional level – resilience be improved, e.g. by providing helpful information?
The IMPACCT research group will develop new and improved methods – based on state-of-the-art informatics and machine learning - for classifying and extracting relevant health information from social media content, so that this information can be considered as a reliable source of data for allergy surveillance in a climate change perspective. This innovative approach, together with environmental data sources and monitoring data will provide the possibility of modelling for a decision-support tool that could provide predictions of symptoms to be expected, early warnings or help trace the seasonal allergic variations and their correlation with climate factors.
The mechanisms of allergic diseases are diverse and the overall impact of future environmental changes on the diversity, production and distribution of bioaerosols is complex and not yet conclusively understood. Therefore, multiple exposure ("exposome") monitoring in combination with symptom and sensitisation monitoring may reveal new associations and interactions.
IMPACCT will contribute to the improvement of current health and environmental information research. Given the prevalence of allergies within the general population and the importance of their diagnosis and prevention, it will provide solutions for specific challenges to health and social well-being.
The infrastructure developed will add significant scientific and societal value that will be operational and available after the end of the project and can be extended to the whole European Union.
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