PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Air Pollution: Lung Diseases (7 March 2017)

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps her Department took to (a) ensure that schools and nurseries had information on how to protect children's lungs and (b) notify hospitals to ensure that they were on alert for respiratory patients during the high pollution episode in January 2017.

Asked by:
Kerry McCarthy (Labour)

During the January 2017 air pollution episode, Defra issued daily tweets from the UK-Air Twitter account, which provided information about current air pollution levels and accompanying health advice. These included details of the affected regions and links to regionalised maps. These are routinely retweeted by Public Health England and are followed by journalists who use the information to inform their reporting, as well as health charities and campaign groups who regularly retweet information to vulnerable populations.

Defra also issued a press release on 23^rd January, which was updated on 24^th January. This provided details of the episode, including the affected regions and health advice targeted both at the general population and vulnerable people.

Defra also alerted its network of health charities. These alerts provided full details of the nature of the air pollution episode, its geographical location and anticipated duration and links to further information including specific health advice relevant to the episode. The health charities network includes the British Lung Foundation (BLF), who used social media (Twitter and Facebook) to communicate the information, along with the BLF’s own health advice, to their subscribers and patient support groups.

Answered by:
Dr Thérèse Coffey (Conservative)
13 March 2017