The idea that the physical condition of the natural and built environment, air quality, safe drinking water, a stable climate and uncontaminated soil, is itself a determinant of human health, studied jointly by public health and the earth sciences that measure those conditions: meteorology and climatology for air and climate, hydrology and hydrogeology for water, and geology for soil and natural hazard exposure. It is the seam where earth system science meets population health.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Environmental geology applies geological principles to the same human-environment problems the environmental-health concept frames from the public-health side.
Soil contamination and natural hazard exposure connect environmental health to geology.
Air quality and climate effects on health draw on meteorology and climate science.
In Discipline
Safe drinking water and water contamination are a core environmental-health measure that hydrology studies.
In the Other Atlases
Sources
Environmental Health (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationLead sectionQuote, Lead section
Environmental health is the branch of public health concerned with all aspects of the natural and built environment affecting human health.
Open Questions (1 open question)
When Did Environmental Health Emerge as a Distinct Field?
Environmental health's own encyclopedic source names two milestones that are often read as founding moments, Sir Edwin Chadwick's 1884 Association of Public Sanitary Inspectors and the World Health Organization's 1989 and 2016 definitional statements, but the first is the professionalization of sanitary inspection specifically, not the naming or founding of "environmental health" as a distinct concept, and the latter two are definitional updates to an already-existing term rather than its origin.
What would resolve this A history-of-science source tracing when the term "environmental health" itself first came into use as a distinct field name, separate from the older sanitary and public health movement it grew out of.
History of Public HealthEnvironmental Health (Wikipedia)
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