Environmental health: Assessing risks to society

Abstract

Natural and built environment systems that sustains lives by providing healthy living surroundings is under a tremendous pressure from various stressors such as rapid population growth, urbanisation, commercialisation of agriculture, industrialisation, psychosocial factors and the like. Environmental health is now a global issue wherein humans act both as the destroyers and the victims. All types of environmental pollutions (air, water, soil, for example) have deleterious effects on human health in manifold magnitudes across the globe. Therefore, it is essential to have a clear understanding of the nature and extent to which a country is running a risk of environmental health hazards to its society. Considering this in mind, the present paper introduces a new way of looking and assessing the health effects of environmental hazards and pollutions. This new measure, based on a holistic view and system modelling approach, conceptualises, measures and facilitates the management of the multifarious phenomenon of environmental health. It develops, constructs and validates a robust model of management with measurement and thus provides a management strategy to control and improve environmental health. This Kanji-Chopra environmental health model has been especially devised and developed to assess and manage environmental health risks to society by using and constructing a latent variable structural equations model within the certain boundaries of the country's natural and built environment system. It provides a measurement or index of environmental health indicating the extent to which a particular society is experiencing environmental health hazards. Path coefficients indicate the strength of causal relationships among different dimensions of environmental health. The scores of manifest variables of different dimensions of the model pinpoint what exactly is required from the authorities and individuals to improve environmental health in order to mitigate its risks to society.

Keywords:

• environmental health
• physical contact
• air pollution
• water pollution
• systems approach
• bio-chemical interaction
• psychosocial factors
• structural equation modelling
• Kanji-Chopra environmental health model

Notes

Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, 19–22 June 1946; signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives of 61 States (Official Records of the World Health Organization, no. 2, p. 100) and entered into force on 7 April 1948. The Definition has not been amended since 1948.

The term habitat refers to a particular set of environmental factors and is used in a more concrete sense than the environment.

Biotic components include green plants, non-green plants, decomposers animals, symbionts, parasites and men.

Abiotic components include energy, wind, water, fire, gravity, gases, topography and soil.

Ecology is the scientific study of the relation of living organisms to each other and their surroundings. It includes the study of plants and animal populations and communities and ecosystems.

Erik Erikson discussed eight stages of psychosocial development of human beings from infancy to late adulthood. Erik Erikson believed that every human being goes through a certain number of stages to reach his or her full development, theorising eight stages that a human being goes through from birth to death. His widow Joan Serson Erikson elaborated on his model before her death, adding a ninth stage (old age) to it, taking into consideration the increasing life expectancy in Western cultures.