Indicators of Public Health and Environmental Quality

This chapter gives a short outline of the relationship between exposure to environmental contaminants and the risk to public health involved. First, the concepts of health and environment will be introduced to provide a common frame of reference. Then, the relationship between environment and environmental contaminants with health will be described in broad terms. General indicators dealing with the different dimensions of public health and of environmental quality are presented. Some general considerations and criteria are suggested and the suitability of potential indicators for use in geographical information systems is discussed. It is concluded that, at present, many indicators lack one or more of the desired properties of indicators for environmental health. Therefore a set of indirect indicators is proposed.