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HEALTH
AND RISK SYSTEM
Introduction:
What is Health?
| Exercise: |
List
the major aspects that determine a person's health. Rank these
by importance, taking into account the most important factors.
What do you learn from this exercise about the way in which
the natural environment affects our health? |
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Health
is a large overarching concept. We talk of an individual's health, public
health, and environmental health. While the focus of attention is different
for each of these, the three concepts are intertwined. They all depend
on a number of factors, innate and environmental. Human beings give health
a personal and social meaning, a physical and mental meaning. We think
of health—of individuals, of society—as an important
social goal. The natural environment's role in health—through
its effect on our capacity to obtain food, to be secure from extremities
of climate, and from natural disasters—was respected by early human
beings. But as a species, we have now come to rely more on technology
to provide good health. This ranges from mass agriculture to grow and
distribute food and supplements to provide full nutrition, to the use
of life-maintaining, life saving, and life-extending machinery. We have
even turned to technical solutions—anti-depressants, for example—to
overcome diseases sometimes caused by lack of good sleep habits and by
stress from living in a technological world and by our lack of healthy
habits. Thus on the one hand, while technology has helped us rid of various
dreaded diseases—smallpox, cholera—it has created new epidemics:
heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and depression, for example. And some
of today's diseases come from our ignorance and neglect of how the environment
affects human health.
While health
is the property of an individual, it can also be thought of as a property
of a population. Genetics as well as physical, environmental, and socioeconomic
conditions determine population health. Average lifespan (or life expectancy),
resistance to disease (or incidence rates of disease) and other factors
such as birthweight and infant mortality are used as indications of population
health.
In these
notes, we will focus mainly on the effects of the physical environmental
conditions on individual and population health. The ecological, systemic
nature of factors affecting health necessitates an understanding of the
modification of the environment—by technology, individual pollution,
climate change, soil, water, and air quality, migration, and socioeconomic
conditions.
Structural
changes in governments or other political and economic conditions such
as the large scale changes in the former Soviet Union or the numerous
localized wars or the globalization and the globally deregulated trade
prompted by the World Trade Organization all contribute to population
health. These conditions are not considered here in any detail.
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