PU530 Environmental Health Unit 1 What is Environmental Health? Flashcards
What is the segment of public health that is concerned with assessing, understanding, and controlling the impacts on people on their environment and the impacts of the environment on them?
Environmental health
This field is defined more by the problems it addresses versus the approaches it uses. What are some of these problems?
These problems include the treatment and disposal of liquid and airborne wastes, the elimination or reduction of stresses in the workplace, the purification of drinking-water supplies, the
provision of food supplies that are adequate and safe, and the development and application of measures to protect hospital and medical workers from being infected with diseases such as acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
Environmental health professionals also face long-range problems that
include the effects of toxic chemicals and radioactive wastes, acidic deposition, depletion of the ozone layer, global warming, resource depletion,
and the loss of forests and topsoil.
What are the two different environments?
Within the body and outside the body.
What are the three principal protective barriers that separate the two different environments within and outside the body?
The gastrointestinal (GI) tract, the membranes within the lungs, and the skin.
What protects the body from contaminants outside the body?
What protects the inner body from contaminants that have been ingested?
What protects the inner body from contaminants that have been inhaled?
The skin, the GI tract, and the membranes of the lungs.
How are the three protective barriers vulnerable?
For the skin, when contaminants dissolve the layer of wax generated by the sebaceous glands. The GI tract, when contaminants are soluble and are readily absorbed into the body cells, and the lungs when contaminants are absorbed.
How does the body rid of unwanted material?
Vomiting and diarrhea.
When contaminants enter the circulatory system, how are they detoxified and excreted?
Detox by the liver and excreted by the kidneys.
Fun Fact: How much food, water, and air is breathed by humans daily?
1.5 kg (3.3 pounds) of food, 2 kg (4.4 pounds) of water, and 24 kg (52 pounds) of air. Air can be weighed underwater.
What is the most important pathway for the intake of environmental contaminants?
The lungs because people usually cannot be selective about what air is available. The lungs are also by far the most fragile and susceptible of the three principle barriers.
Characteristics of the principal barriers between the outer and inner body (See attached)
What are mechanisms for protecting the lungs from contaminants?
Macrophages that engulf and promote the removal of foreign materials or simple coughing.
What is the personal environment? What is the ambient environment?
The personal environment is one that a person has control over while the outdoor or ambient environment is one someone essentially has no control over.
What % of deaths accounts for the personal environment and lifestyles followed?
70
What are the three forms environment can exist as?
Gaseous, liquid, or solid.
What are the four avenues or mechanisms by which various factors affect people’s health?
Chemical, Biological, Physical, and Socioeconomic factors.
Chemical constituents and contaminants include toxic wastes and
pesticides in the general environment, chemicals used in the home
and in industrial operations (Chapter 4), and preservatives used in
foods (Chapter 6).
Biological contaminants include various disease organisms that may
be present in food and water (Chapters 6 and 7), those that can be
transmitted by insects and animals (Chapter 10), and those that can
be transmitted by person-to-person contact.
Physical factors that influence health and well-being range from injuries and deaths caused by accidents (Chapter 11) to excessive noise, heat, and cold and to the harmful effects of ionizing and
nonionizing radiation (Chapter 12).
Socioeconomic factors, though perhaps more difficult to measure and
evaluate, significantly affect people’s lives and health. Statistics
demonstrate compelling relationships between morbidity and mortality and socioeconomic status. People who live in economically
depressed neighborhoods are less healthy than those who live in
more affluent areas.
Why is the urban environment assuming ever more increasing importance?
Because 60% of the world’s population lives in urban environments, with a major share of it occurring within less developed countries.
Furthermore, health islands created by urban centers increase both the costs for cooling and the concentrations of air pollutants.
What are the effects on populations in the U.S. and abroad when referring to tobacco?
In the U.S., it causes 450k deaths a year and is responsible for 30% of all cancer-related deaths. 35k deaths are attributable to cancers in people subjected to secondhand smoke.
On a global basis, tobacco causes more than 4 million deaths each year, around 11k per day.
The associated annual medical costs and productivity losses exceed $50–$70 billion, and
$50 billion, respectively. In fact, the medical costs represent about 8 percent
of personal health-care expenditures (CDC, 2002a).
If current smoking patterns continue, the annual number of people
killed by tobacco will increase from a level of about 3 million per year in
1990 to about 10 million per year in 2030.
How much of the U.S. population does not achieve minimum daily recommended minutes of walking or its equivalent?
70%. And 40% of adults engage in no leisure time physical activity at all.
What is the difference between the clinical intervention model and the public health invention model?
What about the environmental stewardship model?
The goal of the physician is to prevent a specific disease from leading to death while the public health model, in contrast, calls for preventing the development of disease.
For the environmental stewardship model, the goal is to protect humans by preventing environmental degradation and its resulting impacts on health.
Food for Thought
What are some of the major environmental chemicals of concern to the environmental practitioner? See attached.
Health care is vital to all of us some of the time, but public health is vital to all of us all of the time.
What are the components of Environmental Health?
See attached.
What is used to know what causes the problem and to define its severity in environmental health?
The six step problem-solving paradigm.
How much has the average global temperature increased since the beginning of the 20th Century?
1 degree Celsius
The hottest year in the historical record, 2016, was 1.35°C warmer than the 1850–
1900 average.
The frequency and intensity of hot days and heatwaves have increased, as has the
fraction of rain falling in the heaviest events. A rise of approximately 20 centimeters in
global sea level has raised risks of coastal flooding.
What accounts for 85% of PM globally and for almost all pollution by oxides of sulfur and nitrogen?
Combustion. Fuel, etc.
Combustion is also the major source of carbon dioxide (CO2) and short-lived climate pollutants such as black carbon that are the main anthropogenic drivers of global climate change.
Water Pollution Facts (See Attached)
Soil Pollution Facts
