It is thought by some people that authorities should shift their focus towards tackling environmental and housing problems to prevent illness and disease. Although there are definitely some reasons to perform such actions and possible positive outcomes, I believe that solving the problem requires a deeper consideration and more complex steps to be taken.
On the one hand issues regarding environment and residential conditions inevitably affect one’s health, which leads to a higher susceptibility to common flus or even viruses. Truly, pollution harms a wide range of citizens’ organs of the body: starting with lungs and ending with skin, which is the very first layer of our immune system. Additionally, many cramped apartments situated closely together ease the spread of infections. For example, cities with a higher level of emissions tend to have a worse health statistic, and slums are usually the places where people pass diseases more effectively. Therefore, government must address these issues to anticipate the illness problem.
On the other hand, some infections, especially new or old but mutated viruses, are too contagious and lethal to hope that the solution of the problem confines to dealing with solely environmental causes of it. That said, governments should proceed stimulating science development. especially such fields as microbiology or virology. The most obvious example is one of the recent epidemics of COVID-19, notorious for not being treated very successfully as it is extremely challenging to discover the needed drug. Perhaps, if we had a deeper knowledge on viruses, we would have fought them more easily. Consequently, government should take additional steps to tackle disease, because domestic roots for the problem are not the single ones.
On balance, despite clear advantages of enhancing housing and environmental conditions, unfortunately, it is not enough to prevent illness. Perhaps, this logic may be applied to primitive infections, but when it comes to serious ones, for example, caused by mutated viruses, these precautions do not play a significant role. Hence, authorities should stick to various strategies to anticipate the threat.
