WEEK 4 DISCUSSION

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Health Science

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Jan 9, 2024

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WEEK 4 DISCUSSION What might happen to the air and water in your community if environmental regulations are not enforced? How might your life be impacted? How might your community be impacted? Exposure to air pollution can affect everyone’s health. When we breathe in air pollutants, they can enter our bloodstream and contribute to coughing or itchy eyes and cause or worsen many breathing and lung diseases, leading to hospitalizations, cancer, or even premature death. Both short-term and long-term exposure to air pollutants can cause a variety of health problems. For people with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD/emphysema or chronic bronchitis), air pollution can make it harder to breathe, trigger asthma attacks, or cause wheezing and coughing. Air pollution also increases the risk of respiratory infections, heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer, and more severely affects people who are already ill. Chemical pollution of surface water can create health risks, because such waterways are often used directly as drinking water sources or connected with shallow wells used for drinking water. In addition, waterways have important roles for washing and cleaning, for fishing and fish farming, and for recreation. Another major source of drinking water is groundwater, which often has low concentrations of pathogens because the water is filtered during its transit through underground layers of sand, clay, or rocks. However, toxic chemicals such as arsenic and fluoride can be dissolved from the soil or rock layers into groundwater. Direct contamination can also occur from badly designed hazardous waste sites or from industrial sites. In the United States in the 1980s, the government set in motion the Superfund Program, a major investigation and cleanup program to deal with such sites (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 2000). Coastal pollution of seawater may give rise to health hazards because of local contamination of fish or shellfish—for instance, the mercury contamination of fish in the infamous Minamata disease outbreak in Japan in 1956 (WHO 1976). Seawater pollution with persistent chemicals, such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dioxins, can also be a significant health hazard even at extremely low concentrations (Yassi and others 2001). Reference: USEPA, 2000.   Superfund: 20 Years of Protecting Human Health and the Environment . EPA 540-R-00-007. Washington, DC: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
WHO (World Health Organization). 1976.   Mercury . Environmental Health Criteria 1. Geneva: WHO Yassi, A-L., et,al., 2001.   Basic Environmental Health . New York: Oxford University Press.
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