Environmental Medicine

A new biomedical science related to the study of short-, but also, long-term effects of environmental factors (physical, biological, and chemical) on human health. Although the concept and general application of environmental medicine is certainly older and well known, its vision was only focused to environmental health. In the past, this discipline, indeed, only dealt with solving of existing environmental problems at urban or rural ecosystems that could lead to problems in public health (e.g., contamination of rivers, lakes, wetlands, and other water sources). Currently, this concept is wider. Environmental medicine currently encompasses a plethora of preventive aspects, even considering the importance of the environmental health surveillance. This emergent discipline [Page 604]originated due to the growing number of links between environmental factors and human diseases. Environmental medicine is also called clinical ecology. Adverse effects of the environment on human health have become a major issue throughout the world during the last several decades. This issue is influenced not only by such events as Love Canal, Seveso, and Chernobyl, but also by recognition of the harmful effects of industrial emissions and, for example, worldwide waste problems. In most developed countries with established healthcare systems, environmental medicine has evolved as a special area with sources in the public health sector (environmental hygiene) and also in the individual care for patients with health problems linked to adverse environmental conditions.

Currently, environmental medicine is closely related to different biomedical and environmental sciences such as public health, epidemiology, environmental epidemiology, toxicology, ecology, ecoepidemiology, ecogenetics, global health, tropical medicine, medical geography, medical geology, wilderness medicine, agricultural medicine biometeorology, medical demography, and occupational medicine, among others.

A new important concept was introduced in this field few years ago: the concept of primary environmental care, related in its essence to the methodical principles of the primary healthcare, but in this case oriented to the environment, in which a person is interacting. Primary environmental care is a strategy of environmental action, basically preventive and participative at the local level, that recognizes the right of the human being to live in a healthy and proper environment and to be informed about the risks of the environment for the health, well-being and survival, but at the same time defining responsibilities and duties in regard to the protection, conservation, and recovery of the environment and the health.

With this concept, it is important to add that environmental medicine is also related to public education about the interaction between humans and their environment, as well as to promote optimal health through prevention and effective treatment of the causes of illness.

Other visions and concepts are currently in development; the model of environmental medicine is based on the growing appreciation that the human body is constantly coping with its dynamic environment by means of a number of inherited, built-in, complexly interacting, and usually reversible biologic mechanisms and systems. These systems are designed to maintain overall homeostatic mechanisms among all biological mechanisms. Their ongoing adjustments are unique to the individual and change continually over time.

In the terminology emerged from the environmental medicine science, adverse consequences that result when interactions among biological functions are compromised by external or internal stressors are called the environmentally triggered illnesses. The stressors may range from severe acute exposure to a single stressor, to cumulative relatively low-grade exposures to many stressors over time. The resultant dysfunction is dependent on the patient's genetic makeup, his or her nutrition and health in general, the stressors, the degree of exposure to them, and the effects of seven fundamental biological governing principles: biochemical individuality, individual susceptibility, the total load, the level of adaptation, the bipolarity of responses, the spreading phenomenon, and the switch phenomenon.

...