Disaster Concepts and Trends
Emily Ying Yang Chan in Public Health Humanitarian Responses to Natural Disasters, 2017
Hazard is a dangerous phenomenon, substance, human activity or condition that may cause loss of life, injury or other health impacts, property damage, loss of livelihoods and services, social and economic disruption or environmental damage. Exposure describes people, property, systems or other elements present in hazard zones that are thereby subject to potential losses. Vulnerability is determined by the characteristics and circumstances of a community, system or asset that make it susceptible to the damaging effects of a hazard. In the foregoing equation it refers to the degree of loss (from 0% to 100%) resulting from a potentially damaging phenomenon. Manageability refers to the organisational response to the hazard and the ability of the population to respond to it. Risk is the possibility of damage, loss, injury, death or other negative consequences as a result of the foregoing components (see Case Box 2.6).
Lifestyle as a medical explanatory model
Emily Hansen, Gary Easthope in Lifestyle in Medicine, 2007
Both environmental and lifestyle theories of disease differ considerably from germ theory and theories of immunity and genetics because they utilise explanations for disease which emphasise the social rather than the biological. Environmental understandings emphasise factors external to the human body such as poor foodstuffs, environmental hormones, solar radiation, pollution, medicines, chemicals, substandard housing and sanitation, population density and the biological environment (Chavarria 1989; Hume-Hall 1990; Foster 1995). Environmental understandings can be seen as emphasising the social because environmental damage or contamination is frequently associated with industrial development, socio-economic inequality, working conditions and colonisation. Environmental illness is frequently politicised by activists who argue that various examples of disease (for example, the Love Canal and Woburn leukaemia clusters) result from the actions of governments or large companies (Gusfield 1981; Levine 1982; Brown and Mikkelsen 1990; Brown 1992).
Issues in Fisheries and Aquaculture
Joyce D’Silva, John Webster in The Meat Crisis, 2017
Fish farming has been blamed for many types of environmental damage and destruction. One of the most damaging activities is the destruction of wetlands, both coastal and inland. For example, low-lying coastal salt marshes and mangrove swamps are particularly suitable for constructing ponds for aquaculture for sea bass, sea bream and shrimp (prawns). An estimated 3 million hectares has been destroyed to establish tropical shrimps farms alone. All wetlands are biodiverse habitats and some of the destroyed wetlands were mangrove swamps inhabited by a particularly diverse range of species. Many prawn farms are being built in developing countries where environmental regulation is lax. Similar loss of coastal salt marshes has occurred where sea bass and sea bream farms are established and freshwater wetlands are destroyed to construct catfish and carp farms.
Sustainable biobanks: a case study for a green global bioethics
Published in Global Bioethics, 2022
G. Samuel, F. Lucivero, A. M. Lucassen
Building on the work of scholars promoting an environmental turn in bioethics, and those who have called for a need to consider sustainability as a normative principle within the discipline, this paper brings attention to an area that has received less attention thus far – that is, the ethical issues related to the environmental sustainability of data and digital infrastructures in global health research systems that inform healthcare. Data and digital technologies coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) systems are often considered by policy makers and the industry sector as an ally in the fight against the environmental crisis and in the endeavour of sustainable development (Herweijer & Waughray, 2018; The Royal Society, 2020).3 Furthermore, the development and use of these technologies is quickly expanding due to their promises of saving human lives while reducing costs (Topol, 2012), as well as enabling access to health for populations living in remote areas with scarce health infrastructures (IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, 2017). However, these accounts tend to neglect that these technologies also have negative environmental impacts that need to be counteracted. These impacts are not particularly visible in the health sector, since the laudable aim of saving lives now (or widening access to save lives now) may eclipse the potential risks to future lives through environmental damage.
Embedding planetary health concepts in a pre-medical physiology subject
Published in Medical Teacher, 2023
Christian Moro, Michelle McLean, Charlotte Phelps
Having made the conscious decision to not provide any introduction to planetary health in terms of why it was being included or a definition (to minimise any compounding factors), our research findings suggest that a relatively low-key intervention (in this case, the just-in-time snippets) can be integrated into an existing health sciences or health professions subject, with students engaging and some exploring facts further. Although 71% of respondents provided a definition of planetary health that would have allowed them to ‘pass’ (50%+) had this been an assessment item, and despite two Likert scale items suggesting that they generally felt confident to explain planetary health to someone and that they had learnt about planetary health, the missing element in their definition was the interrelationship between human health and the health of the planet. Their awareness was more focused on the anthropogenic environmental damage, which in itself is an important consideration. Thus, in the next iteration of this subject, a brief rationale will be presented in terms of the relevance of planetary health for health professions graduates. This may be either at the first session or a short 10-min video could be made available for students at the outset of the course.
Antioxidant responses and lipid peroxidation can be used as sensitive indicators for the heavy metals risk assessment of the Wei River: a case study of planarian Dugesia Japonica
Published in Biomarkers, 2021
Yingyu Liu, Jinzi Chen, Zimei Dong, Guangwen Chen, Dezeng Liu
In recent decades, due to the rapid development of industry and agriculture, the environmental damage caused by human activities is rising, heavy metals are one of the common sources of pollution, thereupon the pollution of heavy metals in water is increasing (Shao et al.2016). Agricultural fertilisers, mining tailings, industrial and municipal discharges are the main routes for heavy metals to be released into rivers (Pan and Wang 2012). Heavy metal pollution of aquatic environments is more severe in rapidly developing industrial areas, and it has given rise to elevated global attention due to the possibilities of causing serious impairments to aquatic ecosystems and human health (Xia et al. 2018). Therefore, it is of great significance to pay attention to the concentration of heavy metal ions in the Wei River for the optimization of residents’ life in the surrounding cities and the comprehensive environmental governance of pollution in the Wei River.
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