Chapter 6. Chapter 6: Environmental Health

How do the fields of public health and environmental health help improve the health of human populations?

Why You Should Care

Many diseases that affect humans have environmental components. Drinking water contaminated by sewage can transmit cholera to whole villages in days. Influenza and other respiratory diseases are transmitted by airborne or physical contact vectors, so they are more likely to spread in densely populated urban areas. Guinea worm disease is a waterborne disease that needs human hosts: Humans carry, nourish, and transmit the disease to new hosts.

Public health treats infectious diseases and seeks to limit their spread through human populations. Environmental health asks questions about the environment’s role in the spread and seeks to use the disease’s environmental needs (sewage-contaminated water for cholera) to design plans to minimize their spread. Knowledge of the environmental conditions helps to identify the environmental weaknesses and then help public health officials to contain and eliminate the threat. Lessened threats translate into lowered mortality and increased life span among the human population.