Human hyealth and environment

People’s wellbeing and health have always been depended on the quality of environment, but the last decade the environmental situation has become so complicated and insecure that these issues became very urgent and attract very serious attention.

When we speak about health we imagine an ordinary, typical state of functioning of an organism or a system. When we say “healthy person” we mean a concrete person who doesn’t have any diversions in physiological and psychological spheres. When we say “healthy nation” we presuppose that indicators of health of every representative of this nation in total have quite a satisfactory level. When we say “healthy economy” we mean that we speak about a typical economic system that is developed according to ordinary rules and which doesn’t seem to cause any worries about its unpredictability in the future. In the latter case the notion of “health” acquires a bit different meaning as it goes beyond medical meaning. But whenever we use the notion of health we mean the normality of development of anything we talk about.

So, health is a state of an organism (or in a wider sense of a system) when all its organs (system components) are able to function according to the normal processes.

Human health is an integral notion and is characterised by parameters which are related to its physical, psychological and social essence.

Numerous observations and special research demonstrate that human health is very much dependant on lots of factors of natural development (figure 6.1.)

Figure 6.1. Conditions influencing human health

All known factors of the environment can influence the state and development of the organisms and that is why at the end of the day they predetermine qualitative characteristics of populations. The majority of the factors are necessary for the development of living organisms; though, there are also such factors that have a destructive influence on them. In the table below we demonstrate the examples of the influence of some environmental factors on human health.

Table 6.3.