Risk to Women’s Health
Even though safety, security, and better health are vital human rights, not everyone can enjoy or access these facilities. Gender, social, cultural, economic, political, racial, and geographical factors are among the obstacles limiting health security. But that is not all: new variables and threats continue to emerge for already jeopardized individuals.
Environmental hazards are an emerging concern for deprived, marginalized, and non-affording individuals, including women. Environmental hazards like polluted air, contaminated water, unhealthy food, chemical pollution, climate change, and unsafe habitat can pose and increase risks for several well-being complications, especially when individuals lack protection and timely access to healthcare facilities. Since environmental hazards and climatic events influence lifestyles, habits, behavior, and psychology, more and more women are at risk of several physical and psychological health issues than their counterparts.
The following passages further dive into how the environment and environmental hazards affect the health and well-being of women.
But whatever the root causes, there is no justification for gender-specific threats. If you’re a victim in any way, do not put aside your gender-related insecurities. Reach out to credible and unbiased champions of justice to fight and protect your legal rights. One such source is Simmons Law Firm which specializes in helping victims of asbestos exposure and mesothelioma seek legal protection and compensation against their loss.
Now, let’s understand the environmental health hazards facing women.
Higher infertility
Since women have a specific fertility window, any detrimental change in their fertility apparatus or hormonal homeostasis can affect their fertility. Fertility is subjected to many hereditary and emerging factors throughout their reproduction timespan. For instance, many research studies also document the correlation between environmental pollution and the infertility of mammalian species. Exposure to hazardous chemicals from smoke, air and water pollution, food contamination, and disease-causing agents can impair their fertility health.
Though the environment and its constituents can pose risks to the fertility health of both genders, women experience the worst complications. The ratio for infertility for women stands at nearly fifty percent compared to only 10–15 percent of couples. Numbers are further down for their opposite-gender counterparts.
Environment-induced infertility risks should raise alarms for decision-makers, global discussions, and policies. They also need protection and assurance with gender-friendly and sustainable healthcare and environmental policies.
Pregnancy complications
Climate and environment pose many threats to reproductive and overall health and well-being. Studies reveal that various constituents of the environment can increase risks for miscarriage, preterm birth, stillbirth, and anemia. Even the safest living spaces can be toxic and detrimental to the well-being of mothers and newborns if one investigates the microscopic details.
Exposure to hazardous chemicals, waste, persistent organic pollutants, ionizing radiations, pesticides, and smoke, can cause several complications and anomalies in newborns. These can range from low birth weight, spina bifida, down syndrome, heart defects, gastroschisis, cleft lip, and others. In short, natural disasters, climatic changes, and environmental hazards can affect access to healthcare facilities, food security, and affordability of families, multiplying challenges for expecting women.
Premature aging
Lifestyle and environment are the top creditors behind premature aging in both men and women. For instance, high-intensity ultraviolet rays cause intensive tanning, skin dryness, wrinkles, and irritation. And in severe cases, skin cancer. Women are also prone to hazardous exposure through skincare products. Even minute traces of harmful chemicals and metals like lead, mercury, and cadmium in skincare products can lead to detrimental side effects on skin and overall health upon regular use. The same goes for unnecessary skin experiments like anti-aging ionization therapies, medications, and injections.
Poor nutrition and non-affordability to seek dermatological help on time further multiply their problems. Air and water pollution can also increase risks for various dermatological conditions in both men and women. But being more disadvantaged on multiple fronts, women need more flexibility, affordability, and knowledge to minimize consequences.
Psychological issues
The environment is an emerging threat to physical and mental health and wellness. But complications increase when one lacks protection and resources and has little say in influencing the policies related to environmental sustainability. Females’ psychological health is more susceptible to environmental hazards due to gender biases on multiple fronts. Increasing temperatures, unfolding devastating natural events, and unsustainable policies increase their helplessness.
Recent reports from across the world show how erratic weather changes like wildfires, draughts, and flash floods affect women of all ages. More than the threats to their well-being, they feel more hopeless about the insecurity of their children and families. But these unfortunate events and circumstances are more intense, havocking, and lasting. Many studies attribute climate change and environmental hazards to clinical conditions in women, including post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, suicidal tendencies, substance abuse, personality disorders, social isolation, and dementia.
Cancer
Studies reveal that only 7% of malignancies have hereditary causes. Humans’ interaction with the environment is responsible for the remaining 93% of cases of malignancies. Biological, physiological, psychological, genetic, and environmental factors increase the odds for women more than men. As a result, direct or indirect exposure to tobacco smoke, fine dust particles, harmful rays from sunlight, toxic gases from factories and transportation, pesticides, fertilizers, polluted water, contaminated food, and disease-causing pathogens collectively multiply risk factors for cancer in women.
Unsafe skincare products, unguided use of off-the-shelf or prescription medications, and ionization radiation therapies further increase their susceptibility to genetic mutations or malignancies, including ovarian, breast, cervix, skin, respiratory tract, lungs, lymph nodes, blood, pancreas, bladder, stomach, and kidney cancer. In addition, direct or indirect contact with hazardous and carcinogenic chemicals like asbestos, benzene, beryllium, cadmium, arsenic, nickel, vinyl chloride, and radon also contribute to malignancies in women.
Poor skeletal strength
Poor skeletal health is one of the many detrimental effects of the environment on women’s health and well-being. Osteoporosis affects nearly one-third of females aged fifty or over globally, but osteoporosis is not only age or diet related. Environmental hazards like harmful chemicals, fertilizers, and pesticides can disturb the metabolism of bone-strengthening vitamins and nutrients, leading to loss of bone mass. Fear of exposure to ultraviolet rays can deprive your body of synthesizing vitamin D.
Etiology studies on osteoporosis also show that prolonged exposure to carbon dioxide correlates higher with bone loss. Long-term exposure to air pollution and inhalable particulate matter can increase the risk of osteoporosis and fractures. In short, healthy bones and skeletons require more than vitamin D and calcium to prevent the chances of bone thinning and fractures. Even if you ensure adequate intake of these vitamins, many other risk factors can undermine skeletal health. Harmful chemicals, waste, toxins, and other environmental hazards can find their way through the food we intake, the air we breathe, the water we drink, or the space we inhabit.
Conclusion
Environmental pollution and hazards are global, yet threats are higher for some population segments, especially women. But gender is in no way an excuse or justification for many threats to women’s health and well-being. They also have an unquestionable right to a healthy, sustainable, and safe habitat. If environmental hazards fixate on gender-specific characteristics, stakeholders should make policies to offer them more protection and safety.
