Environmental health hazard

Rajendra Uprety

Anthropogenic disturbances and natural disasters in the past have exposed millions of tons of undesirable commodities in the sky. Unfortunately, this has resulted into an environment on the brink of gloom that will be handed over to future generations.

The world faces a common problem of degrading environment and global warming. Each day industrial flux, kiln smoke, vehicle emissions and incinerators add million tons of harmful gases and particulate matters to the atmosphere. Carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and sulphur gases contribute largely in polluting the world.

Rapid industrialisation has already spread over 23 million hectors of land. Wasteful consumption of fossil fuels during the last few decades have also led to a number of toxic gases and hazardous chemicals being emitted into the surroundings making if further unsafe. Thousands of deadly poisonous chemicals have already been released and are suspending over the earth surface – threatening the bio-world.

It is estimated that more than 500 different lethal substances are found as contamination in the fats and muscular system of the human body in a measurable amount. Globally over 72 million barrels of oil are used each day for the movement of automobiles and food or material production. The major source of commercial energy, fossil fuel, supplies 85 percent of the total energy demand. Similarly, nuclear power that requires high care to control due to the threat of unwanted radiation, supplies over seven percent of the total energy demand.

The rapidly increasing carbon dioxide and green house gas concentration in the global atmosphere is not only raised from industrial sectors but also come from the burning of fuel in automobiles. Over 90 percent of automobiles worldwide have internal combustion engines. The demerit of the engine is the high emission rate of nitrogen oxides and particulate matters.

The California Air Resource Board has estimated that heavy-duty vehicles emit about 30 percent of nitrogen oxides and 56 percent of particulate matters of all on-road vehicle emission in California. Burgeoning popularity of cars and two wheelers, possessing easy handling property over mass transit automobiles has in fact created further difficulties for environmentalist. Scientific analysis shows that normally a car emits 90 times, taxi emits 113 times, three wheelers emit 60 times and two wheelers emit 49 times more carbon dioxide than a bus. Today OECD countries emit two-thirds of the carbon dioxide emission of all motor vehicles worldwide. The United States emitted 23 percent of the total amount of carbon dioxide in 1998 and this value was 11.8 percent higher than in 1990. It was also estimated that Europe would emit 26 percent of global carbon dioxide emission, which equals to some six billion tons of it over the period of 1999.

Automobiles, the developing roots of atmospheric pollution have led the South Asian environment into a worse scenario than before. Carbon dioxide emission rates from these countries contribute to over 37 percent of the global carbon dioxide emission. Mumbai, Calcutta and Delhi are the most polluted cities in the India. In the air of Calcutta, automobiles have contributed about 30 percent air pollution and the value in Mumbai is 52 percent. The immense air pollution of Delhi containing 64 percent automobiles emission has placed the city as the fourth most polluted city in the world along with cities like Mexico.

Uncontrolled metropolitan drainage and hospital outlets have turned the once clean city of Kathmandu into a polluted city. The supply of unsafe drinking water and lack of solid waste management ail the valley dwellers. The air is being poisoned every day – to some extent due to vehicle exhaust released from thousands of automobiles.

Some years ago, devastating fires spread over the forest areas of Indonesia. The thick forest areas turned into spots of shining hazy flames and tremendous amounts of poisonous gases and particulate matters were released into the atmosphere. This release lead to the destruction of invaluable realms of the forest’s biological world forever. Over the region, the sky was filled with smoke and dust, reaching up to a distance of several kilometres in height.

Humans have depleted the biological roof, exposing ultraviolet radiation to the earth surface, by emitting green house substances. Global warming is the result of the high concentration of green house gases in the atmosphere. Over the past twenty decades, the global mean temperature has increased by 2 degree centigrade as a moderate and 4.5 degree as the worst-case scenario, which on average, equals to a 1.2 percent annual temperature increment. In the late 1980s the use of chloro-fluoro carbons (CFCs), source of green house gas, received popularity, escalating the harm to the environment. These substances were used exorbitantly throughout the world in air conditioner, refrigerator, aerosol, and foam producing industries.

During the 1990s Western Europe, North America, and Eastern Europe used almost equal amounts of CFCs. Among these countries, Western Europe used the maximum amount of about 23 hundred tons of CFCs. Air conditioning and the other technological advancements turned into deadly items for the environmentalist. CFCs are the tools that cause sever ozone depletion and the green house effect. In 1998, the Southern Ozone hole appeared to be as large as seven times the size of India and the perilous ozone depletion process is still continuous in both Antarctic and arctic zones.

Getting rid of Spam

Sudan Jha

Spam has become ubiquitous – a part of life, like taxes. Until strong anti-spam laws are passed and enforced, spam proliferation will continue because it reaches a large mass. Most people, however, see spam as the scourge of e-mail and look for ways to stop it from infecting their e-mail boxes. There are several ways to block spam from your e-mail inbox. They say prevention is the best medicine, so avoid giving out your e-mail address to unfamiliar or unknown recipients. However, this has become very difficult. Spammers can use software programmes that troll the Internet looking for e-mail addresses much like throwing a net in the ocean and seeing what is caught in it. Nowadays it is almost impossible to shop online without providing a valid e-mail address. Offline stores are even asking for e-mail addresses in exchange for discounts or free merchandise. It is necessary to realise that what they are actually doing is opening the door to a flood of unsolicited e-mails. These organisations will most likely turn around and sell their list to someone else looking for valid e-mails. In these cases, it might be wise to have two or more e-mail addresses, one for friends, family and colleagues and another for unfamiliar sources.

Ever receive an e-mail greeting card? The sender has given your e-mail to an organisation that may very well be compiling e-mail lists to sell to spammers. A second way to stop spam is to use your e-mail application’s filtering features. Most e-mail applications allow you to block specific messages. When an offending e-mail comes in, set the filter to block further incoming mails from that sender.

A more aggressive approach to ridding unwanted e-mail is to report the e-mailer to the spammer’s web address. This is not always an easy task. First, you must determine the spam’s origins. Many of the bigger and more commercial ISPs forbid spammers from using their services and, once discovered, will actively ban the offending parties from using their services. But, there are plenty of smaller ISPs that do not provide such facilities.

To find the spam’s origins, instruct your e-mail programme to display all of the e-mail’s header information. View the "Received" lines, and working from top to bottom, you can often pinpoint the origin of Spam. Spammers do not typically just send e-mails from their ISP to yours; that would be too easy and apparent. Instead, they channel the e-mails through one or more ISPs in order to obfuscate the origin, but each computer that handles the e-mail will attach a "received" line to the header. There are numerous Internet resources (like http://spamabuse.net/userhelp) available to help in tracking down the source of spam.

Don not be fooled by phrases such as ‘to be removed from this list, click here’. Spammers use these types of catch phrases to entice users to respond to the e-mails. The spammers may or may not remove your e-mail from their list. Either way you have told the spammer that your e-mail address is valid and reaches a real person. They know this because you responded and asked them to remove you from the list. This can actually be more valuable to the spammers because they can now sell your address to another spammer with the assurance that the e-mail address is legitimate. So, you may have been removed from one list, but there is a good chance that you will end up on another. Yet another way to deal with spam is to just not be bothered by it.

Accept spam as an unpleasant fact. Delete the e-mails from your inbox without reading them and move on from there. Sights like http://spamabuse.net include instructions on how to view header information for some e-mail applications. The site http://www.spamanti.net provides information on spam and on how to fight it. It contains many useful resources including black lists of spammers and spamming domains and white lists of supporting people and ISPs, numerous related links, and FAQs. Several organisations work with ISPs to identify and remove spammers from the Internet. One of which is the Spamhouse Project (http://www.spamhaus.org/)

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