**1. Introduction**

During the last century, at the top of industrialization phase, the excessive use of increasingly more complex inorganic and organic chemicals has caused serious environmental contami‐ nation all over the world with acute and chronic effects on population health.

The sites considered to be very contaminated and classified as dangerous are very numerous and often belong to industrial centres; in the past years, the contamination of soil and their contribution to air pollution have had an important role.

In countries characterized by a high socio-economic status, the industrial impact on air pollution is certainly less than the weight of traffic and urban heating, while in the developing and emerging countries, industrialization has still an important and unresolved role because of the lack of legislative management and control.

Epidemiological studies represent the scientific basis used to verify the existence of negative health effects caused by air pollution and to quantify the value of these effects, estimating the dose-response relationships. Many studies have demonstrated that air pollution is associated with a wide range of adverse health outcomes. Statistical analyses, conducted on monitoring and biomonitoring data, also show a relationship between the level of air pollution and the rate of mortality and morbidity. Unlike accidents, pollution is not considered a cause of immediate death. Actually, it is thought that it represents a cause of premature death. Air pollution is associated with a great number of illnesses, such as cancer, respiratory, cardio‐ vascular and neurological diseases, and also diabetes and infertility problems.

The estimated cost of pollution becomes an economic evaluation of the risk of getting sick or dying prematurely. But the effects of pollution are particularly difficult to evaluate in terms

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of quantity and cost. In order to assess the related risk of air pollution, it is certainly very important to establish the effects of pollution on human health, but it is also needful to consider some health determinants such as genetic factors, age, sex, and lifestyle habits.

Considering all these aspects, our proposal includes a chapter about atmospheric and urban pollution describing their relative and assessed effects on human health, with a detailed regard on risk assessment. In the last decades, a large number of legislations have been issued accepting international subscribed agreement, such as the Kyoto protocol, to save public health and restrict the effects of pollution on climate change. We will also focus on indoor pollution, with its insufficient data and relative problems and difficulties in management, on method‐ ologies of study, and on some case reports.
