Thomas Hellsten, director and educator of Preschool Elvan in central Stockholm, welcomes air meters to his farm.
– I would like to see such meters on all the farms in the inner city, he says.
Small children are extra sensitive to air pollution. But despite this, there are no guidelines for monitoring air quality in kindergartens.
– I think it’s bad, I think it should be legal about this.
Emilie Stroh is a researcher in environmental and occupational medicine from Lund University. She’s got it a questionnaire among the Swedish municipalities recently discovered that the municipalities today have poor control over the air quality in the pre-school yards. Just over 10 percent of municipalities have ever measured air quality in a kindergarten.
The sky has improved in our cities for the past 50 years, and in Sweden the air is also cleaner than in many other places.
But the particle holder as Emilie Stroh and her colleagues have measured themselves at a number of traffic-sensitive preschools in Malmö, shows, among other things, levels that can be linked to an increased risk of developing asthma and chronic bronchitis and that children there are at risk of poorer lung function in maturity.
The city of Stockholm has recently have made general calculations of air quality throughout the municipality, but like most municipalities in the country, they have not made specific measurements of the playgroups.
– This is the most vulnerable group and it is a growing group, especially urban children. We must have control over the indoor and outdoor environment of the children.
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