Living in the Environment 17.1 - What Major Health Hazards Do We Face?

Concept: People face health hazards from biological, chemical, physical, and cultural factors, and from the lifestyle choices they make.

Risks are Usually Expressed as Probabilities

Risk: the probability of suffering harm from a hazard that can cause injury, disease, death, economic loss, or damage.

• Typically expressed in a probability - how likely it is that harm will be suffered from a hazard

Probability vs Possibility: possibility establishes that there is a chance of an event occurring, probabillity is the likelihood that this event will occur.

Risk Assessment: using scientific methods to estimate how much harm a particular hazard can cause to human health or to the environment.

Risk Management: deciding whether or how to reduce a particular risk to a certain level and at what cost

Most people are not good at understanding and comparing risks

We Face Many Types of Hazards

We can suffer harm from five major types of hazards:

• Biological hazards: result from more than 1,400 pathogens that can infect humans.
  • Pathogen: a living organism that can cause disease in another organism.
  • Examples are bacteria, viruses, parasites, protozoa, and fungi.
• Chemical hazards: harmful chemicals in air, water, soil, and food.
• Physical hazards: fire, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, and storms.
• Cultural hazards: unsafe working conditions, unsafe highways, criminal assault, and poverty
• Lifestyle choices: smoking, eating too much, drinking too much alcohol, and having unsafe sex.

The key questions are, how serious are the risks we face, and do the benefits of certain activities outweigh the risks?