You are in: Home > Health and Environmental Hygiene - What's new > Indoor air hygiene

Health and Environmental Hygiene

Introduction

Last changed: 13.10.2006

The core focus is on the protection of human health from adverse impacts of various environmental media.

Providing knowledge and advice for the people and the government is the legal task of the German Federal Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt - UBA). For this purpose UBA conducts intramural research and provides grants to external scientists. UBA follows an interdisciplinary approach, which integrates the fields of hygiene, medicine, natural sciences and epidemiology. Human biomonitoring of the quality and quantity of chemical body burdens and the concentrations of pollutants in water, soil and air gives a picture of human exposure.

Data from the area of human biomonitoring, epidemiology, environmental medicine, toxicology and microbiology are combined for the assessment of the risks of environment-related health problems. One outstanding example for this integrative approach is the interdisciplinary cooperation on issues concerning indoor air quality leading to a precautionary concept of indoor air hygiene. Another main field of expertise is the assessment of the health impact of noise on humans which becomes more and more important.

To protect human health the Federal Environment Agency puts its focus on the following issues:

Development, standardisation and quality management for chemical and microbiological contamination of water bodies and in indoor air
Determination and estimation of human exposure to chemical, physical and microbiological pollution of the environment
Taking care of environmental hygiene issues of particular concern to human settlements
A programme of health-related environmental monitoring, particularly the German Environmental Survey for Children and the Human Specimen Bank
Issues of bathing water hygiene as well as compilation of the national bathing waters report to EU
Participation in the development of health criteria of the EU directives on air and bathing water qualities
Development of guideline values for indoor air hygiene and health-related assessment of emissions from building products
International cooperation, e.g. with the WHO Collaborating Centre for Air Quality Management and Air Pollution Control, on matters of ambient and indoor air pollution for the European region.

This work contributes to good environmental hygiene practices throughout the country and continuously provides background information in standardisation and regulation processes on a national and international level.

Issues