Volume 4 Issue 1 (April 2005)
Harold Harvey and Paul Fleming
In our opinion the importance of research in environmental health cannot be over-emphasised - you would expert this from the editors of this Journal! It is very helpful, and indeed gratifying, for leading organisations to make the same point. Thus the reference in the European Commissions ‘European Environmental and Health Action Plan 2004 - 2010’ is welcome, “Research is crucially important in establishing the knowledge base and providing concrete measures by which European environment and health research results will be fed into policymaking, for analyzing and filling the gaps in European environment and health activities.” With this statement, as part of the action plan, comes another rather important consideration if quality research is to be carried out – funding. We encourage academics, professionals and organisations to submit research proposals to the EU through the Public Health Programme and the Sixth Framework Programme for Research. In a later edition of the Journal we hope to include a paper on writing proposals for funding.
A significant proportion of the activities of environmental health departments in the UK is regulatory enforcement. In this issue of the Journal we include two papers on this theme. A leading environmental health academic, author and magistrate, Terry Moran, examines the key factors influencing magistrates when hearing environmental cases.
The author challenges the commonly held opinion of the regulators, that it is the magistrates’ court that has failed when there is a failure to hand out a sufficiently harsh deterrent sentence. Paul Lehane, a London based EHP, reviews the law surrounding what he refers to as body art. The act of piercing another person’s body in the guise of fashion, beauty or for ritual purposes can give rise to a range of physical injuries that could constitute a serious offence under UK law. The paper examines and interprets the basic elements of common and statute law relating to physical and sexual assault in the context of the practice of body art.
The other papers deal with issues within the core environmental health subjects of housing, food safety and environmental protection. Each paper helps to fill a gap in our knowledge and, hopefully, will feed into the policy making process and contribute to the improvement of environment and health control measures.
Carol Phillips, Professor of Microbiology, and Paul Bates contribute to the on-going research into the control of Campylobacter. They report on a study which investigates the effects of effluent from three potential sources – an abattoir, a cattle market and farmland grazed by cattle with nearby poultry farm – on the levels of Campylobacter spp. in a river. Cheong and Neumeister-Kemp, researchers based at Murdoch University in Australia, consider the potential of high efficiency HEPA vacuuming to reduce airborne indoor fungi and fine particulates in carpeted homes. Monitoring was conducted with N-6 Andersen samplers for viable airborne fungi and cultures incubated, counted and differentiated. Outdoor samples were concurrently collected for comparison with indoor levels.
At a time of considerable debate about passive smoking and smoke-free environments Graham Perry, a Community Health Coordinator with a local health board, reports on his study which provides measures of local smoking status and exposure to ETS amongst adolescents in Wales.