Environment

In technologically and economically advanced countries, the biological effects of various forms of physical and chemical pollution of the environment and the psycho-social effects of living and working conditions associated with industrialization pose serious health problems, whose importance and gravity we do not fully appreciate today.

The effects on health of the main agents in the environment are relatively well know-occupational exposure on acute accidental contamination. But then, the individual or combined effect of pollutants on large population groups at low dosages over a long period is another story, the ending to which we do not know. This is true of the various forms of stress of modern life.

Food and drinking water, like air, are contamin-able by bacteria, chemicals and radio-isotopes. The same applies to soil pollution, which in industrialized countries is alarming. Industry attracts labour; consequently few agriculturists have to resort to the use of a wide variety of chemicals and pesticides to produce enough to feed a nation. Industry demands energy and raw materials in exploiting nature and plunders natural resources, dumps waste material from mining and metal smelting, and strews domestic and household wastes all around.

No is a widespread scourge of the industrial world. In the work environment city streets, airports and rail terminals and in the home even, noise sources proliferate, at deafening levels, with a varied effect on health from deafness to non-specific physiological effects on cardio-vascular system, respiratory tract, the eye etc. It is ironic to think that noise is not all that difficult to subjucate, as for example, air pollution. Noise is an universal annoyer and interferes with sleep and thereby has a profound impact on psycho-social behaviour.

Occupational diseases and injury from specific exposure to risk at work is by now familiar to all industrial civilization. But the fact such exposure to work stresses can and does aggravate cardio-vasular repiratory, neurological and/or mental disease or factors in diseases of multiple nature is not just as well known even among doctors.

All kinds of environmental stress, physical agents like heat, cold, noise, vibrations, poor illumination, abnormal pressure, radiation (IR, UV and ionising), chemical contaminants like toxic gases and dusts, physiological impact from high work rate and postural discomfort, biological pathogens like microbes and fungi psychological stresses like human relations, morale and boredom-are all present in work places at levels higher than normal. We seek to safeguard the workers from such hazards by protective and preventive measures, rooted in science, medicine and engineering. We set upper limits of safe exposure (termed threshold limit valcut, maximum allowable concentration or permissible doses) for many hazards, such that the occupational threat to health is insignificant.

In most modern industries, such mundane hazards have been overcome, but problems of health and well being linked with psycho-social factors, working and living conditions, urban life, transport and recreation, all interacting complexity remain to be solved.