Health and the Environment

The Health Protection Agency has a duty to protect people from environmental hazards and threats to health. One of the key aims is to anticipate and prevent the adverse effects of acute and chronic exposure to hazardous chemicals and other poisons.

Environmental hazards have a major impact on people's health and quality of life. These potential hazards include air and water pollution, land contaminated by previous industrial use and poor housing quality.

The Chemical Hazards and Poisons division works with the medical community and others, including the public, to educate them about the most up to date science on environmental health. At the same time, the division carries out research and interprets data to make recommendations to government departments on the best methods for creating standards or other appropriate legislation to ensure that the population's health is protected.

Children's health is particularly vulnerable to environmental hazards and this forms a specific focus for our work.

The HPA has a responsibility to conduct surveillance of environmental incidents that can potentially affect health. We are developing a research base to support incident tracking and response.

In particular, we are developing an Environmental Public Health Tracking System to quantify, characterise, and monitor the impact of the environment on public health, and on children in particular.

Last reviewed: 27 February 2008