Concerns
Environmental health addresses all human-health-related aspects of both the natural environment and the built environment. Environmental health concerns include:
- Air quality, including both ambient outdoor air and indoor air quality, which also comprises concerns about environmental tobacco smoke.
- Body art safety, including tattooing, body piercing and permanent cosmetics.
- Climate change and its effects on health.
- Disaster preparedness and response.
- Food safety, including in agriculture, transportation, food processing, wholesale and retail distribution and sale.
- Hazardous materials management, including hazardous waste management, contaminated site remediation, the prevention of leaks from underground storage tanks and the prevention of hazardous materials releases to the environment and responses to emergency situations resulting from such releases.
- Housing, including substandard housing abatement and the inspection of jails and prisons.
- Childhood lead poisoning prevention.
- Land use planning, including smart growth.
- Liquid waste disposal, including city waste water treatment plants and on-site waste water disposal systems, such as septic tank systems and chemical toilets.
- Medical waste management and disposal.
- Noise pollution control.
- Occupational health and industrial hygiene.
- Radiological health, including exposure to ionizing radiation from X-rays or radioactive isotopes.
- Recreational water illness prevention, including from swimming pools, spas and ocean and freshwater bathing places.
- Safe drinking water.
- Solid waste management, including landfills, recycling facilities, composting and solid waste transfer stations.
- Toxic chemical exposure whether in consumer products, housing, workplaces, air, water or soil.
- Vector control, including the control of mosquitoes, rodents, flies, cockroaches and other animals that may transmit pathogens.
According to recent estimates, about 5 to 10% of disability adjusted life years (DALYs) lost are due to environmental causes in Europe. By far the most important factor is fine particulate matter pollution in urban air. Similarly, environmental exposures have been estimated to contribute to 4.9 million (8.7%) deaths and 86 million (5.7%) DALYs globally.
Read more about this topic: Environmental Health
Famous quotes containing the word concerns:
“In common with other rural regions much of the Iowa farm lore concerns the coming of company. When the rooster crows in the doorway, or the cat licks his fur, company is on the way.”
—For the State of Iowa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The country is fed up with children and their problems. For the first time in history, the differences in outlook between people raising children and those who are not are beginning to assume some political significance. This difference is already a part of the conflicts in local school politics. It may spread to other levels of government. Society has less time for the concerns of those who raise the young or try to teach them.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)
“Science asks no questions about the ontological pedigree or a priori character of a theory, but is content to judge it by its performance; and it is thus that a knowledge of nature, having all the certainty which the senses are competent to inspire, has been attained—a knowledge which maintains a strict neutrality toward all philosophical systems and concerns itself not with the genesis or a priori grounds of ideas.”
—Chauncey Wright (1830–1875)