Personal and Societal Health Risk Factors and Alternatives - Essay Example

"Personal and Societal Health Risk Factors and Alternatives" is an engrossing example of a paper on social and family issues. There are various factors that affect health and those that result in ill health, diseases or death are known as health risk factors. The health risk factors may be behavioral risk factors, biomedical risk factors, and environmental risk factors. From personal experience of seeing how these factors affect people in the community, I recognize the need for creating awareness for these factors to the members of society. Behavioral risk factors are factors that can be reduced or eliminated through the change of behavior or lifestyle. These factors put the health of the community members at risk both at a personal and societal level. They include smoking of tobacco, consumption of alcohol and poor nutrition and diet. Smoking affects the person who is smoking as well as the society around them posing a disease risk to the people. “Alcohol consumption affects the health of the person involved and therefore is a health risk factor at the personal level” (Leddy, 12). Leddy, in this case, helps in emphasizing that alcohol consumption is a health risk factor.

Biomedical health risk factors, on the other hand, are factors that arise from various factors such as genetic factors or lifestyle that a person leads. These factors include obesity and overweight, high tolerance to glucose and high blood pressure. These factors arise out of the lifestyles that people live or they may be genetically inherited from the family. Environmental health risk factors are caused by various environmental factors, which may be social, economic, political, and biological factors. These factors subject health of individuals to risk at both personal and social levels. Some cultural practices may subject some societies to risk of diseases and these practices due to the poor hygienic conditions in which these practices are carried out. The biological factors determine the quality of air in the environment and if the air quality is poor, the people’s health will be at risk. Environmental factors may subject people to conditions such as hazardous substances in water, air, and soil and which might be harmful to people’s health. The environment may also subject people to natural disasters and other physical hazards. “Climatic changes in the environment may as well subject people’s health at risk” (Bounty, 83). The climatic factors therefore if unfavorable may interfere with the good health of people and might result in diseases or other forms of ill health

To deal with the health behavioral risk factors, there is a need for creating awareness of the community affected and enhancing those with unhealthy lifestyle behaviors such as alcohol smoking and alcohol to stop. Another initiative will be teaching the society concerning the risk that smokers pose to their health and encouraging them to discourage smokers from smoking in public. The appropriate alternative for dealing with the biomedical health risk factors is educating the community on the appropriate measures to take in case of generic biomedical factors is educating the community on the appropriate measures to take in the case where the resulting health conditions occur. In case of the biomedical factors associated with the lifestyle of the people in the community, the best initiative will be to educate the community on the appropriate measures to prevent the occurrence of factors such as obesity and being overweight. These will include changing their dietary behaviors to ensure they prevent the occurrence of these factors. The initiative for environmental factors will be to educate the community on how to prevent the occurrence of negative effects resulting from these factors.

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