Environmental Public Health and Safety

Environmental Public Health and Safety

ENVIRONMENT is the totality of biological, physical and social circumstances surrounding a defined quality of life, health or behaviour or problem.  These biological, physical and social circumstances or environmental conditions interact with behaviour to produce health effects or quality-of-life outcomes.  Health effects or quality-of-life outcomes in our environment is testimony of our environmental health because environmental conditions influence behaviour risk factors for disease, either healthfully or adversely.  These risk factors, sometimes known as enabling factors include availability, accessibility and low-cost unhealthful consumer products, examples; cigarettes machines which enable smoking by adolescents even where laws prohibit sale to minors, labour-saving devices which foster sedentary lifestyles, fast food which is convenient but often too high in salt and fat, alcoholic beverages sold at sports events which put intoxicated fans in the driver's seat on the road home.

ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH:  Overall, a systematic assessment of factors in the social and physical environment that interacts with behaviour to produce health effects or quality-of-life outcomes gives us attention to environmental health.  Environmental health is knowledge concerned with the prevention of disease through the control of biological, chemical,physical or cultural hazards or agents in the air, water, food, soil and society and the control of the environmental factors that may have impact on the wellbeing of people.  Hazard means a potential harm and an environmental hazard is a substance or agent that has the ability to cause some type of adverse health effect, be it minor damage to a tissue, serious illness or death.  Health is affected by complex, interrelated factors of heredity and environment.