Pollution
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Pollution has become a major issue over the years because it contaminates the Earths environment and affects human health. While some environmental pollution is a result of natural causes such as volcanic eruptions, most is caused by human activities. The increase of various types of pollution has made cancer pollutant more prevalent among the people, raising the risk of getting cancer. After being exposed to theses pollutants, the effects may be immediate or delayed. Some of the delayed effects, due to the exposure, can go unnoticed for many years. Another major issue that pollution creates is the tremendous cost for preventing and cleaning it up. However, we can not regulate the pollutants to the extent where there are no more possible threats. The most we can do is to minimize the effects of the potential risks, which we may encounter as a society. We can approach this matter by conducting different types of test from animal studies and epidemiological studies.
To regulate pollution, we first have to have an idea of what type of effects it will have on the general population and then determine the acceptable amount of exposure level. Since the specific risk here is that the individual will get cancer, after being exposed to a pollutant, possibly leading to their death, we have to consider a few factors such as age, sex, and their health status. Depending on how old the person is, if they are relatively young then he or she may not be affected by the pollutant because their immune system can probably fight off the pathogens. Gender can also make a difference, since males and females have different biological anatomies, thus the pollutant may be resistant to females but not the males or vice versa. Finally, the health status of a person also has to be considered. If a person is healthy and fit then maybe age might not matter and it will decrease their potential threat from the pollutant. After all of these factors are taken into account we have to regulate the carcinogenic pollutant and determine an acceptable level of risk. To determine what the effects are after an individual has been exposed to this pollutant and gets cancer, we can perform animals or epidemiological studies. Even though the animal studies will not be deterministic since we are not using human subjects to collect the data, it will give us an idea on how another living organism is affected. Another study we can conduct is the epidemiological analysis. This is the study of short and long term effects of a pollutant in a particular population.
One possible way to control the carcinogenic pollutant is to get a bill passed by Congress, which makes it mandatory for industrial places to reduce the amount of pollution they create. By reducing the amount of pollution production, the exposure level of the carcinogenic pollutant will decrease. This law enforces the industrial companies to establish new methods and strategies to create their products with less pollution distribution in the end. As another preventive measure, there are products available to the population that contains carcinogenic elements that can be taken off the market until they are redesigned and approved by the government. One last effort to regulate the cancer pollutant is to increase the funds for research so that we can have a better understanding of cancer and how to cure it. Consequently, we can create better drugs available to the population, which can decrease the chances of people, with cancer, from dying.
Now that we have the regulations into effect, the next thing to do is determine appropriate levels of exposure and the risk level. However, this raises the question of how do determine what a human life is worth. There is no conclusive answer to this question, so we have to take