Environmental health is a multi-disciplinary science that studies the dynamics of the interactive relationship between a group of people with a variety of changes in components of the human environment that could be expected to cause health problems in the community and efforts to control and prevention.
In its broadsense, environmental health is the segment of public health concerned with assessing that is, understanding, and controlling the people on their impacts of environment and the Impacts of the environment on Them.
Based on the above understanding, environmental health is a part of public health attention on the assessment, understanding, and control of human impacts on the environment and human impacts on the environment.
Environmental health is essentially a condition or state of optimum environments, and therefore contributes positively to the establishment of an optimum health status as well.
According to the Law of the Republic of Indonesia Number 36 Year 2009 on Health, stated that the environmental health efforts aimed at realizing the quality of a healthy environment, whether physical, chemical, biological, and social which allows each person to achieve the degree of the highest health. Healthy environment as referred to in this legislation covers neighborhoods, workplaces, recreation areas, and places and public facilities, which must be free from elements that cause health problems, among others, liquid waste; solid waste; waste gases; waste that is not processed in accordance with the requirements set by the government; disease-carrying animals; hazardous chemicals; noise that exceeds the threshold; radiation ionizing and non ionizing rays; contaminated water; air polluted, and contaminated food.
While the linkages between environmental health and the onset of health problems and illnesses, according to Soemirat (2005), arises whether the disease in humans depends on three important elements, namely: 1) host (host), ie all the factors contained in human beings that can arise and affect journey of a disease. Agents are grouped into biological classes, and the Environment (environment) is the aggregate of all conditions and external influences that affect the lives and development of an organism.
Imbalance of the relationship between host, agent and environment are not balanced cause disease. Imbalance can occur due to a lack of host resistance, disease resistance of seedlings increased or changing environments, by contrast, people will be healthy (not affected by disease) in the event of balance, that is a good host resistance, the ability of germs that low and a good environment. Based on the description, it appears that the approach is limited to discussion of the epidemiology of health problems especially those related to illness. Therefore, in recent epidemiological approach is growing, so it can be applied in various spheres of life in the community environment.