Your Environment and You

Your environment consist of your immediate surrounding. This includes those physical elements you see and touch such as the soil, trees, water bodies and even animals and your green fields, and those elemnts you can only feel such as air etc. Its very important to note that you need your environment as much as it needs you. This mutual relationship ensures that the balance of the ecosystem is maintained. This balance in turn enforces the continuance of life in the system. Certain results of human activities can destabilize this harmony. They include introduction of contaminants into water bodies and surrounding air. Deforestation and indiscriminate destruction of the wild.

Neglected Tropical Disease Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) represent a group of diverse diseases that cause significant morbidity and mortality worldwide but have until recently received limited attention from the affluent regions of the world. More than 1 billion people – one-sixth of the world’s population – suffer from one or more NTDs. These diseases affect the world’s most vulnerable populations, almost exclusively poor and powerless people living in rural areas and urban slums of low-income countries. Their impact on individuals and communities is devastating. Many of them cause severe disfigurement and disabilities, including blindness. NTDs coexist with poverty because they thrive where access to clean water and sanitation is limited, and people live without protection from disease vectors. The NTDs also are recognized as a contributor to poverty since they can impair intellectual development in children, reduce school enrollment and hinder economic productivity by limiting the ability of infected individuals to work. Fortunately, seven of the most prevalent NTDs can be targeted using a similar public health strategy developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) known as preventive chemotherapy. This strategy involves large-scale distribution of high quality, safety-tested NTD medicines. The delivery platform for these medicines is known as mass drug administration (MDA). Due to the strong safety profile of these medicines, WHO endorses their delivery by trained, non medical personnel, such as community volunteers and teachers. Most of the drugs needed are donated by pharmaceutical companies.

What effects can the Environment have on Health? Hazards can present themselves to us in various media e.g. air, water. The influence they can exert on our health is very complex and may be modulated by our genetic make up, psychological factors and by our perceptions of the risks that they present. The following deals with general environmental health hazards, and not extremes of climate, occupational hazards, hazards associated with food, most "accidents" or sexually transmitted disease. Health effects from economic and social consequences of environmental change are also not considered here. Associations between an exposure and an adverse health effect do not, on their own, prove that the former is the cause of the latter. Many other non-causal associations could explain the findings. These concerns explain why the language in this context may well be "hedged" even though you might have formed impressions from other sources that some postulated causal associations had been proven. Although you will have heard or read a great deal about the environmental consequences of global warming, man will probably be affected through famine, or war long before the health of the population as a whole is harmed to a serious degree by the temperature change. However increasing extremes of temperature, as a result of climatic change, could result in increased mortality even in temperate climates. Important issues concerning physical hazards include those relating to health effects of electromagnetic radiation and ionising radiation. If one excludes the occupational environment, then noise and other physical hazards may present a nuisance to many inhabitants, and impair general well being. Environmental noise does not usually contribute to deafness but notable exceptions may include noisy discotheques and "personal stereos". Electromagnetic radiation ranges from low frequency,relatively low energy, radiation such as radio and microwaves through to infra red, visible light, ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays. These last as well as other forms of radioactivity such as high energy subatomic particles (e.g. electrons - Beta rays) can cause intracellular ionisation and are therefore called ionising radiation. Exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation carries a increased risk of skin cancer such as melanoma, and of cataracts which are to an extent exposure related. Some pollutants such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used as refrigerants or in aerosol propellants or in the manufacture of certain plastics can damage the "ozone layer" in the higher atmosphere (stratosphere) and thus allow more UV light to reach us, and harm us directly. Ultraviolet light may also cause harm indirectly by contributing to an increase in ozone in the troposphere (the air we breathe) - see below under chemical hazards, or elsewhere in connection with air quality. Ionising radiation from the nuclear industry and from fallout from detonations contributes less than 1% of the annual average dose to inhabitants of the U.K. The explanation for leukaemia clusters around nuclear power plants is not yet resolved. Similar clustering can occur in other parts of the country. The effect of viral infections associated with population shifts may be important but requires further study. Non ionising electrical, magnetic or electromagnetic fields are an increasing focus of attention. The scientific evidence of adverse health effects from general environmental exposure to these fields is "not proven". If there are adverse effects yet to be proven, the risk is probably likely to be very small. If one includes tobacco smoke as an environmental hazard then it probably represents the single biggest known airborne chemical risk to health, whether measured in terms of death rates or ill-health (from lung cancer, other lung disease such as chronic bronchitis and emphysema, and disease of the heart, especially, and of blood vessels and other parts of the body). To a much lesser degree of risk, these adverse effects apply to non-smokers exposed passively to sidestream tobacco smoke. General airborne pollution arises from a variety of causes but can usefully be subdivided into pollution from combustion or from other sources. The image shows the silhouette of a power station - an important source of airborne products of combustion. Combustion of coal and other solid fuels can produce smoke (containing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons - PAH) and sulphur dioxide besides other agents such as those also produced by: Combustion of liquid petroleum products which can generate carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen and other agents. Industry and incineration can generate a wide range of products of combustion such as oxides of sulphur and nitrogen, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, dioxins etc. Combustion of any fossil fuel generates varying amounts of particulate matter. It also adds to the environmental burden of carbon dioxide - an important "green house" gas but in these low concentrations it does not affect human health directly. Combustion of fuel can also generate hazardous substances in other ways, besides by chemical oxidation, such as by liberating benzene (from the "cracking" of petrol) or lead (from leaded petrol). Undoubtedly tens of thousands of deaths have resulted from acute pollution episodes (e.g. the smogs in large cities in the early 1950s). Nowadays some people e.g. asthmatics can be adversely affected by excursions in levels of urban air pollution (notably ozone) in some major cities. What is still unclear is the extent to which urban airborne pollution in the majority of cities complying with current air quality guidelines, contributes to ill health, i.e. whether the air quality guidelines are stringent enough, to protect all the population.

credit to: http://www.agius.com, www.neglecteddiseases.gov

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