Abstract: Air quality has been strongly influenced by anthropogenic activities since the Industrial Revolution. Air quality management remains without efficient control strategies by public authorities to reduce the concentration of environmental pollutants, which can cause serious health problems and lead to fatalities. Rio de Janeiro also suffers from air pollution, especially the metropolitan area. MARJ, which contributes 65% of the GDP of Rio de Janeiro and comprises 21 municipalities, with an estimated population in 2019 of 12,899,152 inhabitants. According to the Portal da Indústria, in 2021, around 38,2% of industrial companies in the state were extracting oil and natural gas, and 14.9% oil derivatives and biofuels. To assess the air pollutant concentration, the Rio de Janeiro state has 125 air quality monitoring stations, which have consistently violated Brazilian air quality standards and the WHO guidelines, which are more restricted than Brazilian standards. According to the WHO, the recommended concentrations for PM2.5 are 15 and 5 μg/m3 for 24h, and annual average, respectively, to ensure fewer adverse health effects. The recommended concentration for ozone is 100 μg/m3 in 8 hours. Among the health effects that PM2.5 can cause are cardiovascular, stroke, and respiratory problems, according to the WHO. In addition, according to the Ministry of the Environment of Brazil, ozone has the effect of worsening asthma symptoms and other respiratory difficulties such as emphysema, bronchitis, and cardiovascular problems. As mentioned, MARJ has been suffering from high air pollutant concentrations, causing harmful effects on the health of the population. Due to this situation, this work aims to estimate avoidable deaths and hospitalizations in MARJ from 2015 to 2019, if the concentrations of PM2.5 and ozone were within the WHO limits. To achieve this objective, the relative risk equation will be applied as a function of the concentration of the pollutants PM2.5 and ozone-related to the ICD of the diseases.The diseases that will be analysed are: cardiopulmonary (I00-I09; I11; I13; I20-I51; I60-I69; J09-J18; J40-J47), lung cancer (C33-C34), diseases of the circulatory system (ICD-10, I00- I99) and diseases of the respiratory system (ICD-10, J00- J99). The analysis will be based on relative risks already calculated from other studies involving the same diseases and the same group of people. The relative risk equation was based on the Andreão e Albuquerque (2021). The data on mortality and hospitalizations will be taken from DataSUS, and the air quality data from the INEA database. The expected results will be that it will be possible to determine a strong correlation between the pollutants analyzed in concentrations above the WHO limits and the diseases of the focus in order to further prove the importance of maintaining air quality, especially for the health of our society.

Keywords: Air pollution, Air quality standards, mortality, hospitalizations, Rio de Janeiro.