Environmental Health Midterm Review

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering water sanitation, ecological concepts, public health core functions, air pollution, environmental justice, risk communication, environmental psychology, industrial hygiene, and sustainable agriculture.

Waterborne Pathogen Vulnerable Groups

Populations at heightened risk of illness from contaminated water, specifically identified as elderly persons, patients with HIV/AIDS, persons taking steroids, and young children.

Landscape Irrigation

The primary use of water in the dry climates of the western United States.

Finished Water

Water that is delivered to the distribution system after undergoing treatment.

Aquifer

A layer or section of earth that contains freshwater.

Water Scarcity

An annual supply of renewable freshwater of less than $1{,}000$ cubic meters per person.

Water Stress

An annual supply of renewable freshwater between $1{,}000$ and $1{,}700$ cubic meters per person.

Hydrological Cycle

The natural cycle by which water evaporates from water bodies, condenses, and returns to the Earth.

Drinking Water Disinfection

The treatment of drinking water with chlorine or alternative methods in the United States to remove pathogenic microorganisms.

Coagulation

A step in drinking water treatment specifically designed to remove suspended particles from water.

Oikos

The ancient Greek word meaning "home" or "place to live," from which the term ecology is derived.

Bioaccumulation and Biomagnification

Processes through which persistent environmental pollutants progressively concentrate and increase in trophic levels up the food web.

Species Extinction Threshold

The point in conservation biology where extinction becomes irreversible, occurring when the death rate for all populations of that species exceeds the birth rate.

Regulating Ecosystem Services

A category of ecosystem services defined by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment that includes air and water quality regulation, climate control, erosion prevention, disease transmission management, pest control, and pollination.

Emergent Properties

System characteristics that can only be observed when the component parts of a complex system are interacting with one another.

DPSEEA Model (Pressure)

The "P" component of the Driving Forces-Pressures-State-Exposure-Effects-Actions framework, exemplified by increases in vehicle miles driven in the context of traffic-related air pollution.

Primary Prevention (Environmental Health)

Public health interventions centered on health promotion and specific protection, enacted before disease develops.

United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992)

The 1992 international meeting where many foundational environmental public health prevention principles were formally articulated.

Core Functions of Public Health

The three foundational duties defined by the U.S. Institute of Medicine (IOM): assessment, policy development, and assurance.

Environmental Health Surveillance Systems

Systems fulfilling the essential public health service of monitoring environmental and health status to identify and solve community environmental health problems.

Biophilia

The concept that human beings possess an innate emotional affiliation with other living organisms.

Attention Restoration

The idea that contact with nature aids in recovery from attentional fatigue, thereby improving focus, memory, and interpersonal interactions.

Neighborhood Greenness

An environmental health measure typically quantified by assessing the extent of tree canopy coverage.

Green Exercise

Ordinary physical activity, such as jogging, carried out in outdoor, natural environments.

Mobile Sources of Air Pollution

Transportation-related emissions that must be reduced to lower anthropogenic carbon monoxide pollution.

Temperature Inversion

A meteorological condition in which a layer of warm air traps cooler air near the surface, causing a greater concentration of pollutants close to the earth's surface.

Criteria Air Pollutants

A designated group of widespread air pollutants regulated under the Clean Air Act; smog itself is not classified as one of these individual pollutants.

Carbon Monoxide Standard (NAAQS)

The National Ambient Air Quality Standard established as of 2010, which limits carbon monoxide levels to $9\,\text{ppm}$ over an 8-hour period.

Sulfur Dioxide ($SO_2$)

A major chemical contributor to acid rain that causes acute adverse respiratory effects, such as bronchoconstriction, in humans.

Warren County Protest (1982)

The 1982 demonstration by a predominantly African American community in North Carolina against the siting of a polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) hazardous waste landfill, sparking the modern environmental justice movement.

Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States (1987)

The landmark United Church of Christ publication that provided the first comprehensive national evidence of demographic disparities in hazardous waste facility locations.

Minority Move-In Hypothesis

The disproven hypothesis that demographic disparities around toxic sites arise because minority populations relocate to hazardous areas following site placement due to depressed housing prices.

Health Disparities

Systematic differences in health outcomes resulting from the cumulative convergence of social vulnerability, unequal environmental exposures, and biological or physiological susceptibility across groups.

Health Impact Assessment (HIA)

A proactive, multidisciplinary decision-making approach that provides an alternative to conventional risk assessment for incorporating cumulative health impacts.

Generational Equity

The concept addressing the unfair, disproportionate burden of toxic environmental exposures and resulting adverse health consequences borne by children and future generations.

Right to Know

The legal and regulatory principle requiring public transparency of environmental and occupational risks, exemplified by OSHA's Hazard Communication Standard and SDWA Consumer Confidence Reports.

Social Marketing

The adaptation of commercial marketing methods to encourage voluntary behavioral shifts that benefit individual and public well-being.

Confirmatory Bias

The cognitive tendency to seek, accept, and favor information aligned with prior beliefs while ignoring, discounting, or reinterpreting contradictory evidence.

Self-Efficacy

A person's confidence in their ability to take protective action, cultivated after environmental emergencies by delivering clear, prioritized instructions.

Texas Sharpshooter Effect

An epidemiological observation illustrating how chance or spurious clusters appear when boundaries are retroactively drawn around randomly grouped cases.

Epidemiologic Triangle

The traditional tripartite model of disease causation involving interactions between agent, host, and environmental factors.

John Snow

An English anesthesiologist who conducted pioneering natural experiments during cholera epidemics in London, documented in "Snow on Cholera."

Sir Percival Pott

A London surgeon who authored "Chirurgical Observations" and provided the first clinical description of an occupational environmental carcinogen.

Incidence Rate Formula

A statistical epidemiological measure calculated as $\left(\frac{Z}{Y}\right) \times 100{,}000$, where $Z$ is the number of new cases diagnosed and $Y$ is the total population at risk during that time frame.

Environmental Psychology

A subfield originating in the 1960s from social psychology that examines the transactions and psychological relationships between people and their built or natural environments.

Social Comparison

A psychological nudging technique that fosters pro-environmental behavior by comparing an individual's or household's consumption against that of their peers.

Defensible Space Principles

Oscar Newman's architectural and planning guidelines designed to prevent crime through natural surveillance, territorial markers, and access control (which exclude firearm ownership).

Control (Industrial Hygiene)

The fourth phase of the industrial hygiene paradigm (anticipation, recognition, evaluation, control) that is routinely performed by industrial hygienists rather than exposure scientists.

Walk-Through

An observational walk-through inspection typically used to execute the recognition phase of hazard identification.

Passive Air Samplers

Sampling tools that capture airborne pollutants by relying on natural diffusion onto a sorbent collection medium rather than powered pumps.

Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

The least preferred and lowest tier of risk reduction within the industrial hygiene hierarchy of controls.

Exposure vs. Dose

Exposure denotes the contaminant mass that contacts an outer tissue boundary, whereas dose denotes the mass that successfully crosses into internal tissue.

Biomarker Measurements

The direct laboratory analysis of human biological matrices (such as blood or urine) for chemical pollutants or their metabolites, considered the gold standard for exposure assessment.

Cumulative Exposure Assessment

The systematic measurement of total aggregate human exposure to multiple distinct chemical substances that share a common toxicological mode of action.

Monoculture

The continuous agricultural cultivation of a single crop species, such as commodity corn or soybeans, over large cropland acreage.

Eutrophication

The ecological process wherein excessive nutrient run-off (nitrogen and phosphorus) promotes algal blooms, resulting in hypoxia and aquatic dead zones.

Glyphosate

A widely used herbicide formulated for genetically engineered crops, classified as a probable human carcinogen by the World Health Organization.

Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs)

Carbon-based chemical contaminants, such as DDT, PCBs, and dioxins, that resist environmental breakdown, accumulate in adipose tissue, and bioamplify up the food web.

Farm Bill

U.S. federal omnibus legislation that directs billions in subsidies toward commodity grain crops like corn and soybeans while providing comparatively little support for fruit and vegetable producers.