Book description
Pollutants, Human Health and
the Environment
is a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of environmental pollutants that
are of current concern to human health.
Clearly structured throughout,
the main body of the book is divided by pollutant type with a chapter
devoted to each group of pollutants. Each chapter follows a similar
format to facilitate comparison and discussion. For each pollutant,
the authors describe the sources, pathways, environmental fate and
sinks as well as known toxicological effects. Importantly, the second
chapter on heavy metals and other inorganic substances deals with
trace element deficiencies which can have serious problems for human
health. Some rocks and soils are naturally low in some trace elements
and intensive agriculture over the past half century has effectively
mined many trace elements reducing their levels in soils and crops.
The final chapter is a discussion about the various risk assessment
frameworks and regulations covering the main pollutants.
- Comprehensive, up-to-date coverage of environmental pollutants of
concern to human health
- Clearly divided into pollutant type with each chapter devoted to a
different pollutant group
- Clearly structured throughout with the same format for each
chapter to help facilitate comparison and discussion and enable
readers to prioritise chemicals of concern
- Description of the sources, pathways, environmental fate and known
toxicological effect
- Includes contributions from leading researchers and edited by a
team of experts in the field
Professor Jane Plant is a leading geochemist based at Imperial who
has made major contributions to Earth and Environmental Science,
concentrating on issues of particular relevance to society.
Professor Plant is an international expert on chemicals in the
environment, especially the naturally occurring radionuclides such as
uranium and the trace elements arsenic and selenium. She developed the
BGS Geochemical Baseline of the Environment (G-BASE) programme which
maps the distribution of many different chemicals over the land
surface of the UK and allows their interactions to be studied using
geographical information systems or other digital methods. She
developed the methods of systematically and reproducibly sampling and
analysing sediment, soil and water samples, as well as the first
quality-control systems for such data. The standard of the data is
widely acknowledged as the best in the world, and the methods have
been adopted by the IUGS/IAGC Global Geochemical Baseline Programme,
which she leads jointly with the United States Geological Survey. She
has used the data for many environmental studies, including issues
related to human health and agriculture. She and her team have worked
on problems related to human health in Asia and Africa helping, for
example, to identify the relationship between a lack of available
selenium in parts of China with the incidence of a type of heart disease.
