GET THE APP

Global Journal of Public Health and Epidemiology

Commentary - Global Journal of Public Health and Epidemiology ( 2022) Volume 10, Issue 1

A brief note on environmental health

P Oliveri*
 
Department of Environmental Health Engineering, Larestan University of Medical Sciences, Larestan, Iran
 
*Corresponding Author:
P Oliveri, Department of Environmental Health Engineering, Larestan University of Medical Sciences, Larestan, Iran, Email: Parisa.Oliveri@gmail.com

Received: 01-Feb-2022, Manuscript No. GJPHE-22-59433; Editor assigned: 03-Feb-2022, Pre QC No. GJPHE-22-59433(PQ); Reviewed: 17-Feb-2022, QC No. GJPHE-22-59433; Revised: 21-Feb-2022, Manuscript No. GJPHE-22-59433(R); Published: 28-Feb-2022, DOI: 10.15651/2465-7557.22.10.215

Description

Environmental Health (EH) is the department of public health that is focuses on the relationships between humans and their environment promotes human health, fosters healthy and safe communities. Environmental Health (EH) is a key part of any comprehensive public health system. The field works to improve policies and programs to reduce chemical and other environmental exposures in air, water, and soil to protect humans and offer communities with healthier environments.

Environmental health is the science and practice of preventing human injury and infection and promoting well-being through identifying and evaluating environmental sources and hazardous agents and limiting exposures to hazardous physical, chemical, and organic agents in air, water, soil, and other environmental media. Environmental Health (EH) is the branch of public health concerned with all aspects of the natural and built environment affecting human health. It is focuses on the natural and built environments for the benefit of human health. The main sub disciplines of environmental health are: environmental technology; environmental medicine and occupational medicine, toxicology and environmental epidemiology.

The primary role of environmental health is to protect the health and safety of the general public from any harmful exposures that they may encounter. Their process consists of ensuring that people’s homes and workplaces are hygienic and healthy. In other words, environmental health organization act as advisers, risk assessors, educators and in some instances enforcers. We face countless environmental hazards every day and to better understand them, we can think of them as falling into four categories: physical, chemical, biological, and cultural. The four main components of environment which includes hydrosphere, atmosphere and biosphere, corresponding to rocks, water, and air respectively. A number of specific environmental health issues can impede human’s wellness. These issues consist of chemical pollution, air pollution, disease-causing microbes, lack of access to health care, poor infrastructure, and poor water quality.

Environmental health as used by the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe, includes both the direct pathological effects of chemicals, radiation and some biological agents, and the effects on health and well-being of the psychological, social and cultural environment, which includes housing, urban development, land use and transport. Five basic disciplines generally contribute to the field of environmental health: environmental epidemiology, toxicology, exposure science, and environmental engineering. Each of these five disciplines contributes different information to describe problems and solutions in Environmental Health (EH). However, there is some overlap among them. Environmental epidemiology studies the relationship between environmental exposures which include exposure to chemicals, radiation, microbiological agents, etc. Observational studies, which simply observe exposures that people have already experienced, are common in environmental epidemiology because humans cannot ethically be exposed to agents or suspected to cause disease.

Toxicology studies how environmental exposures lead to specific health results, generally in animals, as a means to understand possible health effects in humans. It has the advantage of being able to conduct randomized controlled trials and different experimental studies because they can use animal subjects. However there are differences in animal and human biology, and there can be a number of uncertainty when interpreting the effects of animal studies for their implications for human health.