Background on health effects of acid aerosols.

This introduction to the 1987 NIEHS-EPA Symposium on the Health Effects of Acid Aerosols reviews the state of our knowledge on this topic as of the close of the 1984 NIEHS Conference on the Health Effects of Acid Precipitation (Environmental Health Perspectives, Volume 63) and the results of some key studies completed since that time. These studies, together with the results of the studies presented in the papers that follow, provide a substantial increment in our knowledge of the health effects of acid aerosols.