Environmental Health & Biomedicine

This book contains most of the papers presented at a meeting held in Riga on two important topics, i.e. the study and modelling of Environmental Health Risk and Biomedical problems.The field of environmental health is defined by the problems faced and by the specific approaches used. These problems include, amongst many others, the treatment and disposal of liquid and airborne wastes, the elimination or reduction of stresses in the workplace, purification of water supplies, the impacts of overpopulation and inadequate or unsafe food supplies, and the development and use of measures to protect hospital and other medical workers from being infected with a variety of diseases.Related topics included in the first part of this volume deal with sessions on environment problems such as air and water contamination; health effects associated with buildings, toxicology and disease studies. Of special interest are the papers on food safety and occupational hazards. The contributions also include research presentations on risk prevention and monitoring.The second part of the book deals with the development of computational tools for the solution of medical and biological problems. The use of mathematical ideas, models and techniques is rapidly growing and is gaining prominence through the biosciences. Studies are presented on the solution of physiological processes and the very important case of the simulation of cardiovascular systems. One of the most successful areas of bioengineering has been biomechanics and orthopaedics, which are topics studied in several of the papers contained in the volume. The book ends with a section on data acquisition and analysis.This book is aimed at scientists and engineers working in the challenging area of biomedicine and health. It comprises a series of state of the art presentations which describe some of the many advances made in these fields.