Question

• What are some of the important limitations of the epidemiologic approach with respect to the study of environmental health problems?

Answer 1

Environmental epidemiology is a branch of epidemiology that deals with determination of how environmental exposures impact human health.It helps in study of  rates of infectious diseases, and those with an environmental cause such as toxic spillage, food based diseases such as food poisoning or water contamination(may be diarrhoea, cholera), and localized air and water pollution.
Limitations:
1. When the appropriate data are collected and analysed, the conclusions and recommendations derived from these analyses become be out of date due to rapid changes in nutritional and health problems related to environment.
2.Limitation in program evaluation
The one who makes policies expect organisations that are there to deliver a certain intervention should also have the capability to demonstrate an impact on health that will probably be unequivocally traceable to the intervention alone but this becomes almost impossible to achieve due to complex and expensive studies involved in it , as several factors always keep on changing like water quality and concentration of pollutants etc.
3. Epidemology depends on data but sometimes gathering of data is not allowed due to lack of resources and so the health survey workers are not able to submit the data on time.