HOUSING AND HEALTH

Poor Housing and its effects on Health



Poor Housing and its effects on Health

Introduction

It is a widely accepted fact, that not just our “communal” country living in poor housing or office conditions irrevocably affects our health to a significant extent. As mostly people in today's era spend 90% of their lives indoor because of which they remain in contact with all types of dust, fumes and house hold chemicals. Statements like “sick people are getting poorer, and poor people are getting sicker” can be heard in our daily lives. These statements except used as political slogans also show that there is a direct correlation between poverty and illness, and it is a widely realized the fact that poor people mostly live in poor housing conditions. These are particularly vulnerable people trapped in rapidly urbanizing with limited resources and inadequate public policies.

The New Public Health is a powerful concept, which in the UK is yet to attain the political force of its predecessor. In Europe, the World Health Organization (WHO) has made it a more dynamic force, with member states signing up to a European Charter on Environment and Health in 1989 after agreeing, in 1984, to 38 targets for health for all (Burridge & Ormandy 1993, Pp. 427).

Discussion

Along with food and clothing, housing has always been considered as a fundamental necessity for human life. At a minimum housing must provide shelter from adverse physical and psychological conditions to meet the need of a 'place' or their own territory, and is the centre of the primary social group, family. The ways human beings meet this basic need are by the use of a wide range of materials (wood, brick, dirt, cement, stone, branches, animal skins, ice) and the structures of these shelters distributed, cluster or even move according to ...