•Environmental Health
•Objectives
•Explain how the environment influences human health and disease.
•Describe legislative and regulatory policies that have influenced the effect of the environment on health and disease pattern.
•What is Environmental Health?
•The study of environment-related illnesses or disorders and their prevention.
•The segment of Public Health that is concerned with assessing, understanding, and controlling the impacts of one’s
environment on an individual’s health and on a population’s health.
•Historical Context
•Florence Nightingale
•Environment influences health and recover form illness. First one to consider environmental influences.
•Soldiers need to be in contained units. Need fresh water, fresh air (Crimean War).
•Lillian Wald
•Coined the term ‘Public Health Nurse’
•Moved into the ‘Henry Street Settlement’, lived and worked among the industrial poor, she and her colleagues offered health
care to area residents in their homes on a sliding fee scale
•http://www.henrystreet.org/about/history/
•What is different about today’s environment compared to a century ago?
•Clean water, clean air, more regulated
•The Food Quality Protection Act of 1996
•Added new provisions related to protection of infants and children from pesticide exposure from multiple sources. The law
established a health-based standard of reasonable certainty of "no harm" that prohibits taking into account economic
considerations when children are at risk.
•Because crop dusters fly over farms and that adds pesticides to food. Affects illness.
•Environmental Influences to Health
•Biological
•Disease organisms in water and food
•Insect and animal allergens
•Chemical
•Air pollutants, industrial chemicals, agricultural chemicals, toxic wastes, VOCs (volatile organic compounds), food additives
•Are the organic foods really organic? China-air pollutant
•Physical
•Noise, radiation
•Geiger-measures amount of radiation exposed to every month for working in hospital
•Socioeconomic
•Safe neighborhoods, adequate health care
•Do people have adequate transportation, do they have doctor’s offices, etc.
•Environmental Health
•Diet
•Exercise
•Sun exposure
•Worry about farmers, gingers, people who don’t use sunscreen
•Water quality (microbiological and chemical)
•Tobacco use
•Medicines and medical procedures
•Infections
•Consumer products
•Air quality (indoor and outdoor; biological contamination)
•Alcohol use
•Radiation (ionizing, ultraviolet)
•Environmental contamination
•Occupational exposures
•Fields of Study in Environmental Health:
•Epidemiology
•Toxicology
•Workplace safety/Industrial Hygiene
•Air quality control/Indoor Air Quality
•Nutrition and food safety
•Drinking water quality
•Liquid and solid waste disposal
•Rodent and insect vector control
•Radiation safety
•Disaster Preparedness and Response
•Risk Assessment