Environmental Health and World Health

Environmental health, a relatively new field of scientific endeavor, seeks to control all those factors in the human environment which do or may exercise a deleterious effect on man's physical, mental, or social wellbeing. Environmental health originated in the much narrower field of environmental sanitation. Today itseeks to attack all important hazards arising out of man's physical, mental, social (and even ideological) background. The twentieth century has boldly taken the welfare of the human race as its goal and environmental medicine is essential to reaching it, especially on an international basis.

Specifically the practitioners of environmental health and medicine are concerned with the new pollutions of water, air, and foodstuffs and with the dangers of pesticides and ionizing radiation. All these topics are presented in this chapter.

The environmentalist is also interested in the problems of occupational disease and industrial medicine, such as the effects of poi sons and psychological stresses, the new techniques of an expanded field of environmental engineering, wherein one day the engineer may be called on to design a new sewage System and the next to plan a plant for extracting fresh water from sea water; and the manifold challenges of world health, which permits the operation of an efficient international quarantine service. Environmental health may also be taken to include the areas of safety engineering (highway and motor vehicle design, e.g.) and consumer health Plans and costs of new hospitals and health facilities, e.g.).

What is new in the concept of environmental health is the consistent viewpoint that all human activities should be planned to enhance human health and welfare.

THE WATER POLLUT10~ PROBLEM

Back in the 1880's water pollution made headlines when typhoid and cholera epidemics struck some cities. These diseases were dim covered to be carried by water-borne bacteria. It was further discovered, then, that a city's water supply could be rendered safe by purification techniques, such as filtration and chlorination.

For four generations, now, city-dwellers, and their suburban friends, have been taking pure, safe drinking water for granted. "Just turn on the tap!" But the situation is changing. Polluted, dirty water is causing a new and still not completely defined peril to human health. Every glass of water from the faucet is not necessarily clean and potable. New and unusual contaminants are getting into the American water supply. Some are wastes; others are chemicals found in the new pesticides, herbicides, and detergents. These inevitably return to surface or underground waters after they have been washed off croplands, out of barns, or out of kitchens and laundries. Cumulatively they may be hazardous. Drinking water in many communities is beginning to have a definite unpleasant taste. In the southwestern part of the United States there is the special case of public water supplies, as well as waterholes used by cattle and wildlife, becoming contaminated by salt brine.

These present problems in environmental health and medicine should not come as a complete surprise. After all, in the last 50 years, we have doubled the United States population, tucked two-thirds of it into cities, and upped our industrial production about 900%. In these same years hundreds of thousands of new chemicals have been manufactured and have found their way into streams. In some crowded localities water intake has been located dangerously close to sewer outlets. A combination of forces, none of which is rapidly abatine, is polluting the waters of the 1960's and bids fair to continue doing so unless remedial measures are adopted.