How to Achieve Environmental Health

Surveillance System for an Environmental Health Concern
Introduction
Environmental health is an important concern for health care providers because it comprises the areas of human health that are impacted by external factors, such as chemical agents, biological agents, physical environment and so on. Issues that fall under environmental health are air pollution, water pollution, pesticides, chemical spills, and other areas (Laroque, 2009). Because of the risk of these areas negatively impacting human health, there is a need to monitor environmental health areas. One major area of environmental health that desperately needs surveillance is the quality of the air in urban areas near major airports. As Schlenker and Walker (2015) point out, airports are responsible for some of the highest concentrations of air pollution in the nation. An as West et al. (2016) show, air pollution is the cause of millions of premature deaths all over the earth. Thus, there is tremendous reason to be more diligent about monitoring how much air pollution one of the most used forms of travel is putting out. This paper will develop a surveillance system for the environmental health concern of air pollution at airport hubs. It will describe how this source of air pollution impacts environmental health, public health and communities. It will explain the types of surveillance needed for this environmental problem and discuss how various stakeholders can help to prevent this problem from occurring in the future.
Airport Air Pollution
Airport air pollution needs surveillance because it impacts the lives of so many travelers and creates a concentration of pollution in an area near where many people live. Aircraft release a lot of pollution into the air, including carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide (CO), and hydrocarbons—all of which make the air unfit to breathe (Schlenker & Walker, 2015). It is especially important to monitor air pollution coming from airports because neighboring communities, including those that are downwind from airports are likely to be negatively impacted by the release of so much air pollution from these hubs of traffic.
How It Impacts Environmental Health
Klepac, Locatelli, Korosec, Kunzli and Kukec (2018) have found that air pollution can be particularly damaging for pregnant mothers, resulting in a greater risk of preterm birth. Preterm births can impact both the mother and the child. Air pollution can harm children and impact their growth, lead to respiratory issues and more (Simeonova, Currie, Nilsson & Walker, 2018).  And the World Health Organization has classified air pollution as a cancer-causing agent that leads to lung and bladder cancer in people who have to breathe in air pollutants on a regular basis (Simon, 2013). Those individuals who lived in communities that are nearby airports are thus at great risk of contracting illnesses and cancer as a result of their exposure to the pollutants emitted by airplane engines and their exhaust. The environmental health of people is negatively impacted by busy airports and if there is no monitoring of the amount of pollution displaced by these airports, the environmental health area of this concern is neglected and the health of communities is placed at further risk.
How It Impacts Public Health
Air pollution is a major public health concern, as the World Health Organization (WHO) has shown. The WHO (2013) has called air pollution carcinogenic—i.e., poison—and therefore unfit to be breathed by people. Yet people everywhere are forced to breathe in toxic air because of the modern modes of travel that have become so prevalent in societies around the world. Kelly and Fussell (2015) note that improvements in the quality of air that people breathe must be made because air pollution is a major public health concern: air pollution is responsible for many diseases that researchers are only now beginning to understand as being connected to poor air quality. Thus, air pollution is an environmental health issue that negatively impacts public health and has to be monitored to be controlled.
How It Impacts Communities
Communities can benefit from easy access to travel, which flying affords, but they are negatively impacted by the air pollution that comes with access to air travel. Communities that suffer from air pollution are likely to suffer from poor health, and communities that are in poor health will not add advantageous contributions to the rest of society: they will instead bring more costs of care to the state and end up being more of a burden than they are a positive contribution. To ensure that communities have the best chances of contributing to the world, they have to have access to clean air and thus maintain a strong foundation for good health. If air quality around airports is not monitored, communities are at risk of being forgotten and having their children and adults suffer from air pollution that should be controlled. Monitoring air pollution from airplanes is thus an environmental health issue that should be addressed for the sake of communities.
Surveillance System
The surveillance system needed to monitor air pollution will have three parts to it: the hazard surveillance, the exposure surveillance, and the health effect surveillance. Hazards consist of chemicals, toxins and physical pollutants that can harm human health. When tracking in hazard surveillance, the system must examine the concentrations of pollutants within a given area.
For the purposes of this system, hazard surveillance would routinely monitor ambient levels of air pollution. Monitoring would need to be conducted at various sites to provide a triangulation of data sources. The data would have to be of a high quality to ensure that the information generated is reflective of actual air quality.
Exposure surveillance would look at ambient levels of air quality; however, one problem here would be the fact that there would be many contributors to air quality and measurements might not be just of aircraft pollution. To monitor exposure, surveillance equipment would need to be set up in areas where testing can be conducted in real time and a complete grasp of the surrounding environment as well as micro-environment contributors can be had. Exposure of people in the community should be monitored by having routine a monitoring set-up within community locales, too (Abelsohn, Frank & Eyles, 2009).
Health effect surveillance would be monitored by examining hospitalization occurrences, respiratory cases, cardiac occurrences. Data would be collected routinely by the health institutes in coordination with the environmental surveillance team. However, one difficulty here is in associating or linking health emergencies with pollution. Careful consideration must be given to patient background, location and so on with respect to air pollution concentrations.
Types of Surveillance Needed
To collect data, various types of surveillance would be required for monitoring air pollution. A monitoring network must first be established and within this network, the various data sources would be linked. There would be, as Abelsohn et al. (2009) recommend, an integrated atmospheric deposition network, which the Environmental Protection Agency could be part of. The priority here would be to scan for toxic pollutants in the air and to check precipitation as well as this could also indicate the toxicity within the region.
An air quality forecast and advisory system would need to be in place to check for specific air pollutants. The system would also be required to monitor at the most heavily trafficked times in the airport and not just at one specific time that is not reflective of the amount of traffic that is and out of the airport over the course of the day. There should be a coordinated effort to work with the airport to know which times are the heaviest and likely to produce the most pollution and these times could be contrasted with downtimes and air quality levels observed then, too.
There should also be an emissions database maintained, as recommended by the California Policy Research Center (2004). California actually already has a system in place for monitoring ozone, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and lead—all of which should be monitored in this system as well. Moreover, the Environmental Protection Agency has already set out a legal limit for concentration levels of these criteria so that limit must be adhered to.
The Environmental Protection Agency has also put out a National Air Toxics Assessment system, which allows for the estimation of 33 toxic air pollutants. Plus, there is a Toxic Release Inventory program, which places checks on manufacturers and aircraft manufacturers would have to be tested according to this standard. While all of these systems that are available can be helpful, they still rely to some extent on estimation models because of a lack of monitoring in certain regions. This decreases the validity of the monitoring and acts as a limitation on the system overall.
Additionally, there is the reliance on data that is reported regarding emissions and this data is typically only reported when certain thresholds are hit. Therefore, not all emissions data is likely to be collected (California Policy Research Center, 2004). To address this limitation would require more regulation changes at the legislative level, which could be beyond the scope of this project. Nonetheless, understanding that there are going to be limitations on the system is helpful in knowing the extent to which analyses can be thought to be conclusive. Verification of systems data should always be sought by secondary analysis.
How Various Stakeholders Can Prevent This Problem from Occurring
Air pollution is something that impacts everyone. Airport air pollution is really just one small part of a much bigger problem. The main source of CO2 emissions the world over comes not from cars and planes but rather from the agricultural industry: farm animals produce more CO2 than anything else on earth (Lean, 2006). Thus, when it comes to preventing air pollution, the best steps that can be taken may include things like the carbon tax and a shift to clean, renewable energy using green energy sources such as solar power, wind power and geothermal power; however, there are other factors that should be considered as well.
Currently, most of the world’s energy comes from the burning of fossil-fuels. These fuels provide the energy used to fly planes, drive cars, work machines and make electricity. The world is not going to switch over to green energy overnight—and yet if a sustainable culture is desired and air pollution is to be reduced, the world needs to come together over the issue.
Various cities around the world are taking measures to address the issue of air pollution—some with more tenacity than others. Currently, cities on the West Coast of the U.S. show the most promise. Major urban areas like Los Angeles and San Francisco have implemented a number of policies and regulatory acts to crack down on businesses that pollute the air. Other cities like London, Paris, and Berlin in Europe have failed to enact measures at an equal level. The EU has provided regulatory guidelines for cities and issues warnings and fines when cities fail to meet those standards—but the city governments themselves in Europe have so far done little to combat air pollution—other than to apply changes to buses to limit emissions and banned certain vehicles from roads, as Paris has done. Germany could do more to crack down on the auto industry to see that car manufacturers conform with the EU guidelines. Likewise in the East, Beijing and the rest of China needs to focus on getting off of fossil-fuel energy as cities in California are currently seeking to do.
Stakeholders can make a difference by introducing legislation at local, state, regional and national levels to help curb pollution abuses so that clean air quality can be improved, not just in one place but in all locales. Stakeholders in transportation need to find ways to move people from one destination to another without burning fossil fuels for energy. Stakeholders in agriculture need to find ways to meet customer demand for meat, or else the culture of food needs to change so that consumers begin eating more of a vegan or vegetarian diet; the more that consumers demand meet, the more agriculture is going to rely on farm animals, and the more CO2 is going to remain in the atmosphere. Stakeholders have to be willing to look at where they can make changes to their lifestyle and where they are willing to budge. Some people may not like the idea of electric cars, but the alternative is air pollution and a risk to human health. As people lose loved ones to cancer year after year, the reality of risks the world is running by continuing to pollute the air needs to be understood.
Finally, stakeholders in health care can play a part by spreading health literacy and teaching communities how to lobby for change to protect their health. If airports air pollution is going to be a problem, airports should be held accountable. If local leaders are not spearheading change to help protect the health of the public, those leaders need to be replaced. Air pollution prevention is not going to be solved overnight, but it can begin to be addressed by letting the right people get into positions of power wherein they can make change happen.
Conclusion
Air pollution is responsible for harming the health of people the world over. The World Health Organization views air pollution as carcinogenic and air pollution has been linked with causing cancer. Monitoring air pollution at high-concentration areas like airports is important because there are surrounding communities that are likely to be negatively impacted by the concentrated levels of pollutant that result from aircraft emissions. To be sure, aircraft are not the number one source of air pollution: that distinction is reserved for the agriculture industry. What that shows, however, is that if stakeholders in public health want to safeguard their future and engage in environmental health, they need to make major lifestyle changes all the way across the board.
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