Main description:

Health problems related to the environment continue to be a major source of concern all over the world. Society needs to develop measures that will eliminate or considerably reduce hazardous factors from the environment that can result in health risk to humans. This interaction between environmental risk and health is usually complex and involves a substantial number of factors. This resulted in an interdisciplinary meeting in which diverse aspects of the impact of environmental factors in health were discussed.This book contains most of the papers presented at the Fourth International Conference on the Impact of Environmental Factors in Health (Environmental Health Risk 07). The Conference aimed to foster the development of better experimental and modelling tools to achieve the objective of decreasing environmental health risks to humans.

Contents:

Section 1: Air pollution Indoor exposure associated risk for eczema in early childhood; The case of atmospheric pollution using production waste in a building materials factory: an applied industrial case; Indoor air quality in old and new schools; Relation between ambient air and breath volatile organic compounds; A dynamic model of mobile source air pollution and its properties Section 2: The built environment and health Daylight, architecture and people's health; Survey system for life styles of the elderly and to identify the consumption of food and drink; Building materials vs. fungal colonization - model experiments; Use of the in vitro model for the evaluation of toxic effects of metabolites produced by fungi; Validation and implication of segmentation on Empirical Bayes for highway safety studies Section 3: Occupational health Evaluation of physiological comfort index for workers wearing protective clothing in nuclear or other harsh environments; Environmental health risk from past uranium mining and milling activities; The role of measurement accuracy on the heat stress assessment according to ISO 7933: 2004 Section 4: Water quality issues Evaluating safety of drinking water using animal cell bioassays; Health risk related to radon in a thermal spa utilizing waters from Guarani aquifer; Environmental hazard and water quality: the River Platani basin; The contribution of drinking water fluoride to the risk of dental fluorosis in Estonia; Vanadium and lithium contamination in freshwaters of the Conchos River in Chihuahua, Mexico; Arsenic concentrations in the San Pedro River of Chihuahua, Mexico; Nitrate pollution in the Delicias-Meoqui aquifer of Chihuahua, Mexico; Environmental impacts of wastewater from low-rank coal handling processes in terms of mutagenicity and acute toxicity Section 5: Risk prevention and monitoring Climate change, migratory species and pandemic influenza; Environmental education and the health risk question: how do we educate the educators working with this theme?; Risk analysis of heavy metal contaminated habitats using a wolf spider, Pardosa astrigera (Araneae: Lycosidae); Methods for calculating PNECs using species sensitivity distribution (SSD) with various hypothesis on the way to handle ecotoxicity data Section 6: Social and economic issues Khartoum 2030: towards the healthy city; Comparative study of environmental regulations in Latin America; Reducing the environmental health risk of the vulnerable group in a developing country: a case study of metropolitan Lagos