Environmental Health Essay: Water Quality Crisis in Iraq

This essay examines the environmental health challenges related to water quality in Iraq, focusing on the impact of war and contamination on public health. It summarizes a journal article that highlights the high prevalence of waterborne diseases in malnourished populations exposed to unsafe water sources. The essay reflects on the lessons learned, emphasizing the critical link between water availability, sanitation, and hygiene. It argues for combined governmental and public health efforts to implement sustainable changes, including improved access to safe water, monitoring systems, and educational interventions to address the water crisis and promote environmental health in Iraq. This document is available on Desklib, a platform offering a range of study tools and resources for students.

Running Head: HEALTHCARE ESSAY 0
Essay
Healthcare Essay: Environmental Health
(Student details :)
2/22/2019

Healthcare Essay 1
Healthcare Essay: Environmental Health
This essay is based on environmental health of the people who are living in Iraq. It
will describe the main findings as well as summary of the selected journal article (Zolnikov,
2013), along with the learning acquired from this reading for the future. The title itself is
explaining the main content of the journal as ‘The Maladies of Water and War: Addressing
Poor Water Quality in Iraq’ here it is depicting that paper is discussing critical environmental
health issue of poor and unsafe water availability in Iraq (Zolnikov, 2013).
The author of this article is clearly highlighting the fact that water is an essential way
to provide nutrients; hence contaminated water majorly contributes to poor community
health. In this context, water quality as well as availability may create some unstructured
situations like war. Thus, developing a practical strategy to resolve poor water quality
ensuing from sporadic wars in the Iraq country, the author collected and studied info from
many academic sources related to waterborne diseases, water quality treatment, conflict and
war, and malnutrition. The study (Zolnikov, 2013), has revealed that occurrence of
waterborne diseases is high in poor, malnourished population exposed to contaminated water
resources. In this way, acquired data through academic sources helped in formulating a
strategy for improving water quality in Iraq (Al Obaidy & Al-Khateeb, 2013).
Furthermore, the study depicts that due to an extraordinary capability of dissolving as
well as transferring innumerable particles, safe water plays an important role in providing
required nutrients or contributing to injuriousness as well as bad health impacts. In addition,
water quality, nutrients content, as well as availability of water vary in the whole world;
whereas variation depends upon many things such as location, climate and economic status of
relevant country (Esposto, 2009). This is the reason that water characteristics of available
water in Iraq nation can intensely result in unstructured situations like water war (Sustainable
develoment Goals, 2018). In this context, Iraq is located in the dry climate of the Middle
East; it constantly suffers from safe water scarcity along with mass of factors cause water
pollution (Esposto, 2009). Due to above mentioned causes during the past era; Iraq’s
population has faced countless wars, indirectly or directly aggravating long-termed
waterborne disease problems like cholera, typhoid fever, malaria and many more (YEN &
Gracia, 2018).

Healthcare Essay 2
In this way, I learnt that water availability is directly associated with sanitation and
hygiene of any country and hence poor quality water causes severe life-threatening diseases
followed war. I learnt that there are alarming numbers of waterborne diseases continuously
recorded in Iraq nation due to unsafe water. My views and opinion based on this article’s
main findings suggesting that combined efforts of governmental reform as well as public
health are immediately required for implementing and maintaining long-lasting change in
Iraq as well as other water-crisis countries of the world (Zolnikov, 2013). Therefore, long-
lasting decrease in waterborne diseases will majorly require public health as well as health
care reform through developments in access to safe water, monitoring and evaluation systems
along with educational interventions. Future actions over this water issue in Iraq can give
individual access to safe water, ease inter-related cycles of health inequalities, as well as
promote environmental health well-being throughout the Iraq country.
References
Al Obaidy, A., & Al-Khateeb, M. (2013). The challenges of water sustainability in Iraq.
Engineering and Technology Journal, 31(5), 828-840.
Esposto, S. (2009). Sustainability applied to the design of water treatment plants in Iraq.
Sustainability Science, 4(2), 293-300.
Sustainable develoment Goals. (2018). Goal 6: Ensure access to water and sanitation for all.
Retrieved 12 14, 2018, from https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/water-and-
sanitation/
YEN, & Gracia, Z. (2018). Water Borne diseases: types and causes. Retrieved 12 14, 2018,
from https://yen.com.gh/116168-water-borne-diseases-types-causes.html#116168
Zolnikov, T. (2013). The maladies of water and war: addressing poor water quality in Iraq.
American journal of public health, 103(6), 980-987.