What can be done to reduce environmentally mediated health problems?
Interactive Study Guide
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Guiding Question 6.5
What can be done to reduce environmentally mediated health problems?
Why You Should Care
Reducing environmental disease always involves identifying and then minimizing the environmental factors that cause the disease. For any mosquito-based disease (like malaria and West Nile virus), this means minimizing mosquito breeding by draining standing water in tires or puddles, and also minimizing feeding by using nets and pesticides to decrease chances of mosquitoes biting humans.
For other hazards, the main goal is always educating people to minimize their contact with the disease vector (like the ponds infected with Guinea worm disease) and recognize their actions that spread the disease (like not isolating themselves when the Guinea worms infect their body).
Certainly, no program of education and action is going to totally eliminate an environmental disease, but it can reduce infection and break the cycle of parasite and host, and drastically decrease the chances of infection in the future.
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Why is education so important for any program to reduce environmental health hazards?
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Malaria is controlled by spraying pesticides into standing water. This is an example of which strategy to reduce health hazards?
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Cholera is a disease caused by drinking sewage-contaminated drinking water and is prevented by purifying drinking water. This is an example of which strategy to reduce health hazards?
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For GWD, keeping infected humans out of drinking water sources is an example of which strategy to reduce health hazards?
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5.
Why does clean water show up so often as a means of reducing health hazards?
Water serves as a vector for many diseases because humans need and use so much water. We use water that to drink, to bathe, and to dilute our wastes. The more uses we design, the more likely we are to come into contact with infected water OR to infect the water (like GWD). Water is also the habitat for many parasites.
Short-Answer Questions
Climate change is predicted to increase temperatures over wide swaths of the planet and so allow tropical diseases to exist farther north and south of the equator. This warming will expand regions of concern for many diseases that are just beginning to be contained, such as malaria, dengue fever, and parasitic worm diseases like schistosomiasis and trypanosomaisis.
The map below shows the predicted spread of malaria by 2050 using one of the higher temperature scenarios of climate change. The areas that are in yellow show current extent, and the ones in red are the expanded extent of malaria as climate permits its host to exist. Notable areas of expanded range are the Deep South of the United States, central Mexico, southern Brazil, Turkey, and Southeast Asia. These areas contain several hundred million people today.
Malaria is widespread in Africa today and flourishes where temperature is warm and rainfall leads to standing water. Efforts to prevent malaria include seeking medical solutions as well as changes in land-use as clearing forests for farmland increases breeding ponds for the mosquito that spreads the malarial parasite.
This expanded range compounds the environmental health emergency, especially among refugees fleeing tropical areas, and potentially increases the spread of these diseases among new, densely packed populations that have never been exposed to malaria.
For the following, assume you are a health official for one of the areas in red on this map.
1) If land-use is a major factor in providing habitat, then what programs would your department encourage, fund, or advocate for? What other benefits in slowing climate change could those programs provide?
2) What advantages would increased research into curing malaria today provide for these new malarial areas in 2050?
3) The first case of bird-to-bird malaria was documented in 2012 in Alaska, far north of the potential malarial zones. Given climate change may occur faster or in patterns not predicted by scientific models, what changes would you make to your answer to Question 1 on the regional or national level?
1) Land-use programs would have to promote forest conservation to minimize clearing any more land (thus slowing additional breeding ponds). For existing farmland, there needs to be education to encourage farmers to drain ponds or change drainage to keep water out of the breeding ponds. Climate change accelerates forest loss and potentially increases torrential rainfall, so any slowing of climate change would benefit all three aspects (forest, farming, rainfall).
2) Since malarial regions will increase into more populated areas by 2050, research today should benefit far more victims than are affected today.
3) If climate change increases faster or unexpected outcomes like this spread occur, health departments should view regional problems as potentially national problems from the beginning. All programs should be implemented as widely as possible—not just in affected zones today, but in all neighboring zones simultaneously.
