ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH

Where you live can affect your health and well-being

[Name of the Institute]

Where you live can affect your health and well-being

Introduction

Living a healthy life is important as one can only live a happy life, if he is healthy. Living a healthy life can be affecting the well-being as, well. Environment plays a vital role in effecting the human health. The health of human populations intimately linked to the integrity of the ecosystems of living beings. The current development model generates health and social and environmental consequences unacceptable. The United Nations and the World Health Organization have supported programs such as Agenda 21st century, and health for all who are trying to meet basic needs and ethical principles. Their implementation requires creative skills to practice eco-health the establishment of healthy and sustainable communities.

Link between health and environment

The relationship between human health and the environment is of considerable importance at a time when disasters and pandemics announced to multiply. While infectious diseases of preceding centuries had been relatively well controlled, or circumscribed, warnings about the proliferation of sources of contamination again raised. The global warming causes relocation of the vectors of transmission, expanding the potential sources of bacterial or viral infection1. Natural disasters in recent decades are causing large migrations of human populations who find themselves homeless and without access to feed. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that up to 24% of current diseases in the world can be attributed to environmental degradation. In the case of diseases affecting children under five years, an unhealthy environment considered one of the main risk factors.

Urban pollution significantly increases the prevalence of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. The severity of environmental threats to health made evident, moreover, in the disease progression of people in rich countries: cancer and respiratory and cardiovascular diseases have doubled between 1980 and 1995. Pandemics announced, as that which would be possibly associated with avian influenza or one that could result from the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). The incidence of disease resulting from ingestion of food unfit for consumption, the mercury-contaminated fish, beef reaches the “mad cow disease,” heavy metals in baby foods, are examples of complex relationships resulting imbalances caused by lifestyle and production methods, to meet the basic needs of living things.

Besides, even proportion of humanity suffers from malnutrition; obesity and diabetes are endemic in rich countries. Many toxic chemicals in water, air, land, housing and food, can induce neuronal changes that limit the development capacity in children, as is the case for exposure to Lead, a risk factor of lead poisoning. Current studies also show that many carcinogens found in cosmetics and hygiene of the body, some of which associated with breast cancer and prostate cancer. The protection and health promotion confirms the close link between health and the environment and the serious problems of environmental health caused by an inadequate development.

Impact of environment on health

In 1975, Dr. Higginson, director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, said that 80% of cancers ...