Exposure to pesticides, ill health and averting behaviour : costs and determining the relationship

Farmers' exposure to pesticides is high in developing countries. As a result many farmers suffer from ill-health, both short and long term. Deaths are not uncommon. This paper addresses this issue. Field survey data from Sri Lanka are used to estimate farmers' expenditure on defensive behavior (DE) and to determine factors that influence DE. The avertive behavior approach is used to estimate costs. Tobit regression analysis is used to determine factors that influence DE. Field survey data show that farmers' expenditures on DE are low. This is inversely related to high incidence of ill health among farmers using pesticides.

High body mass index is not a barrier to physical activity: Analysis of international rugby players' anthropometric data

Recent data indicate that levels of overweight and obesity are increasing at an alarming rate throughout the world. At a population level (and commonly to assess individual health risk), the prevalence of overweight and obesity is calculated using cut-offs of the Body Mass Index (BMI) derived from height and weight. Similarly, the BMI is also used to classify individuals and to provide a notional indication of potential health risk. It is likely that epidemiologic surveys that are reliant on BMI as a measure of adiposity will overestimate the number of individuals in the overweight (and slightly obese) categories. This tendency to misclassify individuals may be more pronounced in athletic populations or groups in which the proportion of more active individuals is higher. This differential is most pronounced in sports where it is advantageous to have a high BMI (but not necessarily high fatness). To illustrate this point we calculated the BMIs of international professional rugby players from the four teams involved in the semi-finals of the 2003 Rugby Union World Cup. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) cut-offs for BMI, approximately 65% of the players were classified as overweight and approximately 25% as obese. These findings demonstrate that a high BMI is commonplace (and a potentially desirable attribute for sport performance) in professional rugby players. An unanswered question is what proportion of the wider population, classified as overweight (or obese) according to the BMI, is misclassified according to both fatness and health risk? It is evident that being overweight should not be an obstacle to a physically active lifestyle. Similarly, a reliance on BMI alone may misclassify a number of individuals who might otherwise have been automatically considered fat and/or unfit.

Integrating health and sustainability in life cycle assessment

Until now health impact assessment and environmental impact assessment are two different issues, often not addressed together. Both issues have to be dealt with for sustainable building. The aim of this paper is to link healthy and sustainable housing in life cycle assessment. Two strategies are studied: clean air as a functional unity and health as a quality indicator. The strategies are illustrated with an example on the basis of Eco-Quantum, which is a Dutch whole-building assessment tool. It turns out that both strategies do not conflict with the LCA methodology. The LCA methodology has to be refined for this purpose.

Occupant health and productivity : an Australian perspective

The issue of whether improved building services such as air quality, provision of daylight, thermal comfort etc, have a positive impact on the health and productivity of building occupants is still an open question. There is significant anecdotal evidence supporting the notion that health and productivity of building occupants can be improved by improving the quality of the indoor environment, but there are actually few published quantitative studies to substantiate this contention. This paper reports on a comprehensive review of the worldwide literature which relates health of building occupants with the different aspects of the indoor environment which are believed to impact of these issues, with a particular focus on studies in Australia, The paper analyses the existing research and identifies the key deficiencies in our existing understanding of this problem. The key focus of this research is office and school buildings, but the scope of the literature surveyed includes all commercial buildings, including industrial buildings. There is a notable absence of detailed studies on this link in Australian buildings, although there are studies on thermal comfort, and a number of studies on indoor air quality in Australia, which do not make the connection to health and productivity. Many international studies have focused on improved lighting, and in particular the provision of daylight in buildings, but again there are few studies in Australia which focus in this area.