INTRODUCTION

The Scope and Significance of Environmental Factors on Health

Much disease is caused by substances and conditions in people's surrounding
environment, including chemicals and air particles in factories, pesticides in agriculture,
toxic wastes in residential neighborhoods, and radiation in the atmosphere. The
‘environment’ is so broad a term that we could virtually subsume all disease processes
under the umbrella of unhealthy living and working conditions. But when experts speak
of social aspects of environmental health, they generally focus on the health effects
caused by toxic substances in people's immediate surroundings. These chemical-
related, air-pollution-related, and radiation-related diseases and symptoms are the
phenomena that have generated much conflict, policy making, legislation, public
awareness, media attention, and social movement activity.
These social outcomes were prefigured by prior developments in occupational health.
Many harmful effects of chemicals and substances are first found in the work setting,
and then generalized to the community level. There was much corporate, governmental,
and scientific opposition to detecting and remediating occupational causes of disease,
setting a tone for responses to environmental conditions. Even a clearly work-related
condition such as black lung disease was the source of great contention, with
coal miners pitted against corporations and the federal government (Smith 1981).
Mesothelioma (a form of lung cancer) and asbestosis (a pulmonary disease) are now
generally understood to be caused by asbestos, although there was great conflict until
quite recently (Brodeur 1985).
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) sparked the first mass public attention to
environmental health effects. Carson demonstrated how pesticides, especially DDT
(dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane), caused morbidity and mortality in animals and
humans. Her work led to significant pesticide regulation in the USA, the National
Environmental Protection Act, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the new
wave of the environmental movement.
The 1978 Love Canal situation was the first occasion on which human health was
central in an environmental crisis, prompting the creation of the Superfund Program by
the US EPA. Residents were warned by state health officials that toxic chemicals
permeated their neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, where a chemical company
had donated a dump site to the city to build a school. The revelation meshed with
residents's awareness of a history of experiencing health effects. Residents and their
scientist allies discovered elevated rates of miscarriage, birth defects, cancer, and
chromosome damage (Levine 1982). The residents organizing to get action by state
and federal governments led many other communities around the country to act
similarly.
Toxicovigilance

This deals with the process of identification, investigation, and

evaluation of various toxic effects in the community with the aim
of taking measures to reduce or control exposures involving the
substances that produce these effects.
This deals with assessing the toxicity of substances of plant and
animal origins and those produced by pathogenic
bacteria/organisms.