Sa­ha­ran dust con­tin­ues to move through the at­mos­phere. Now the EMA is say­ing the cur­rent Air Qual­i­ty lev­el has reg­is­tered as "un­healthy" on the Air Qual­i­ty In­dex (AQI) at the EMA’s Mon­i­tor­ing Sta­tions in San Fer­nan­do, Ari­ma, Ma­yaro, Pt Lisas and Port of Spain.

"Every­one, in par­tic­u­lar, sen­si­tive groups, in­clud­ing old­er adults, chil­dren, and in­di­vid­u­als with heart or lung dis­ease, res­pi­ra­to­ry ail­ments, and al­ler­gies, are strong­ly ad­vised to avoid pro­longed or heavy ex­er­tion," the EMA ad­vised.

The EMA al­so re­ports that lev­els range be­tween 111 and 159 on the AQI. The in­crease in Par­tic­u­late Mat­ter (PM) is at­trib­uted to Sa­ha­ran dust.

In terms of health com­pli­ca­tions, the EMA warns of:

“In­creased ag­gra­va­tion of res­pi­ra­to­ry symp­toms in sen­si­tive groups in­clud­ing old­er adults, chil­dren, and peo­ple with res­pi­ra­to­ry ail­ments and al­ler­gies; in­creased ag­gra­va­tion of heart or lung dis­ease and pre­ma­ture mor­tal­i­ty in peo­ple with heart or lung dis­ease; in­creased res­pi­ra­to­ry ef­fects in gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion.”

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About AQI and the Na­tion­al Am­bi­ent Air Qual­i­ty Mon­i­tor­ing Net­work

The EMA, through the Na­tion­al Am­bi­ent Air Qual­i­ty Mon­i­tor­ing Net­work has been ob­tain­ing ac­cu­rate, re­al-time as­sess­ment of am­bi­ent air qual­i­ty at strate­gic points na­tion­al­ly.

The Air Qual­i­ty In­dex (AQI) is a num­ber used by gov­ern­ment agen­cies to com­mu­ni­cate to the pub­lic how pol­lut­ed the air cur­rent­ly is, or how pol­lut­ed it is fore­cast to be­come. As the AQI ris­es, an in­creas­ing­ly large per­cent­age of the pop­u­la­tion is like­ly to ex­pe­ri­ence se­vere ad­verse health ef­fects.

There are cur­rent­ly six Am­bi­ent Air Qual­i­ty Mon­i­tor­ing sta­tions in Trinidad and To­ba­go. Five are lo­cat­ed in Trinidad (Ma­yaro, Ari­ma, Port of Spain, Point Lisas and San Fer­nan­do) and the sixth sta­tion is lo­cat­ed at Sig­nal Hill, To­ba­go.