PSYCH447 Lecture Notes - Resource Consumption
22 Jan 2013
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Document Summary
Chapter 17: sustainable health care and emerging ethical responsibilities: The declining conditions of the natural environment is beginning to affect the health of populations in many parts of the world. In the long term, human health requires a healthy global ecosystems. Health care figures both as a solution to environmental decline and as a problem. Environmental cost are most evident at the downstream end of health care: the by- products that leave the systems as waste. The problems of medical waste, particularly infectious materials and biohazardous agents. Health care services rely on an enroumous array of natural resources including common and rare metals, naturally occurring pharmaceutical porecursors, rubber, petroleum, biomass and water. The environmental costs of natural resource consumption in health care have not been carefully studied, so the degree to which health care activities contribute to environmental deterioration is difficult to assess.
