|
Environmental Health Problems
Many things contribute to environmental health problems, such as bad diet, heredity and stress. Environmental health problems are a leading cause for people's compromised health conditions, and it is also a reflection of how one's actions can impact the people around them. Health risks from the environment alone can include anything from skin irritation and nausea to heart disease, cancer and death. Different types of pollution are the cause of many environmental health issues. Many of them are difficult to change, so it is up to people to protect themselves from certain health risks.
Chemical pollution, like all pollution, is a cyclical environmental health problem, meaning the chemicals that we put into the air, water and soil come back to haunt us later. Whether it is the farmers who put them into the soil, which are then later released into the air, or the poor performing vehicles emitting toxic fumes into the air, people are always at risk to these various factors. The number of sources responsible is seemingly endless, from the smoke stacks of every factory to wild fires and other natural disasters that are more uncontrollable.
Pollution does not just reach us through the air, but through our water supply as well. Environmental health problems are derived partly from lack of sanitary water, most notably in developing countries such as India, because as anyone would guess, the quality of drinking water in any environment plays a large role in health statistics. Healthy water, more easily accessible in certain regions, is essential in any living environment, and health risks are a result of poor conditions coming full circle. According to water.org, more than 1 billion people do not have accessible usable water and less than 1 percent of the world's fresh water is of use to people. Many of the slower developing countries have accumulated a variety of diseases in great numbers due to water sanitation alone, because the water that is available to them is primarily untreated after arriving through polluted bodies of water.The pollution that people cast off into the ocean infests and breeds among marine life, which will later be delivered to people on a shiny plate with a glass of undrinkable tap water. Clean Water Acts have been installed in the U.S. in order to enforce high quality surface water. The sanitation laws are meant not only to provide more usable water to humans, but also to support ocean life as well. Environmental regulation plays a huge role in keeping the people of Earth in better living conditions, but there is still much work left to be done.
Pollution has always been a problem of the world, and it is a hard one to avoid. The important thing is to maintain the problem and not let it get out of hand. Although the air and water is likely to never be completely free from pollution, there is a need for awareness that many of the things that are harmfully put out into the environment are cyclical, and they will come back around to us in the end. If people become more conscious of their actions and build more sustainable lives, the effects will be less catastrophic.
|