WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH?
The word 'health' brings many things to mind. Maintaining good health involves eating right, exercising, vaccinations against diseases and visiting your doctor regularly. Your health describes how well your body is functioning and your quality of life.
We can also appreciate health in a broader sense. Environmental health involves understanding the impacts of environmental and human-made hazards and protecting human health and ecological systems against these hazards. This includes studying the impacts of human-made chemicals on wildlife or human health, as well as how the environment influences the spread of diseases.
Types of environmental hazards
We face countless environmental hazards every day. To better understand them, we can think of them as falling into four categories: physical, chemical, biological and cultural.
Physical hazards are physical processes that occur naturally in the environment. These include natural disaster events such as earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanoes, blizzards, landslides and droughts. Not all physical hazards are discrete events - some are ongoing, like ultraviolet radiation. UV radiation is considered a hazard because it damages DNA and can cause human health issues like skin cancer and cataracts.
Chemical hazards can be both natural and human-made chemicals in the environment. Human-made chemical hazards include many of the synthetic chemicals we produce, like disinfectants, pesticides and plastics. Some chemical hazards occur naturally in the environment, like the heavy metals lead and mercury. Some organisms even produce natural chemicals that are an environmental hazard, such as the compounds in peanuts and dairy that cause allergic reactions in humans.
Biological hazards come from ecological interactions between organisms. Viruses, bacterial infections, malaria and tuberculosis are all examples of biological hazards. When these pathogens and diseases are transferred between organisms, it's called aninfectious disease. We suffer from these diseases and pathogens because we're being parasitized by another organism, which, while hazardous, is also a natural process.
Cultural hazards, also known as social hazards, result from your location, socioeconomic status, occupation and behavioral choices. For example, smoking cigarettes is hazardous to your health, and this is a behavioral choice. If you live in a neighborhood with lots of crime, this is a hazard based on your location. Similarly, your diet, exercise habits and primary mode of transportation all influence your health and the health of the environment around you.
