David Statham, Associate editor
As I write this editorial, a mother and child are seriously ill in a Welsh hospital following an outbreak of E Coli O157 associated with a fish and chip shop in Wrexham. I mention this only because one of the papers in this issue describes a salmonella outbreak in a nursing home caused by problems associated with eggs. This brings into sharp focus the fact that although some real progress has been made in tackling food borne disease, there is still much to do. All too often, outbreaks can be traced to ignorance of the risks, which leads to careless or even foolhardy food handling. Despite the introduction of food safety management systems based on HACCP principles, clearly in many cases the message isn’t getting through. This was further highlighted in the report produced by professor Pennington into the outbreak, again of E.Coli in Wales. With environmental health resources as always being at a premium, it is essential that food businesses take responsibility for ensuring the food they serve to their customers is safe and where they fail to do that, they should expect the full force of the law to be brought to bear.
If food borne disease remains a major issue in the UK, then serious epidemic diseases continue to be a threat in many parts of the world, Dengue fever is one such disease, which causes serious morbidity in Malaysia. The ability to trace cases and identify risk factors is key to successfully targeting resources to tackle any infectious disease outbreak, so the techniques described in the paper by Nazri, Rodziah and Hashim could have wider application.
A well established public health principle is that exposure to toxins has impacts on those exposed which may produce acute symptoms or quite commonly chronic ill health in later life. The problems associated with exposure to pesticides, particularly among agricultural workers, have been widely reported, but in a world where higher and higher crop yields are required and the demand for ‘perfect’ crops by those of us in the Western World is taken as the norm, it is unacceptable if this can only be achieved, at the expense of the worker’s long term health.
Those with long memories will remember that back in the 1980s the World Health Organisation issued a wide reaching policy document entitled “Health for All by the year 2000”. A central pillar of that policy was tackling inequalities in health. It was then, and remains so today, morally unacceptable that people born in the wrong countries or to parents from lower social class, or indeed in neglected areas such as English coastal towns, have a lower life expectancy than those born in more favourable surroundings. Rather than eliminating health inequalities as was the aim of the WHO, the gap just gets wider and wider between the haves and the have nots. Perhaps all EHPs should have tackling health inequalities as one of their key objectives and public health authorities, both in the UK and elsewhere in the world, should allocate resources based on tackling this iniquity.
In this issue we introduce a new and special category of paper – the ‘first-author, first-paper’ – which is designed to help build capacity in environmental health publications by encouraging and assisting new authors to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals. When a manuscript in this category is submitted to JEHR, the author will receive more active and tolerant support by the editors in making amendments before submission for peer review. Triantafillia Glania, a doctorate student in the Medical School at the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece, publishes her first paper in this issue.