Public health index for environmental health

At present, the world's population is growing at a tremendous rate. Modern technology and medicine are keeping pace with this growth. However, as modern technology develops a parallel must be maintained with the study of ecology. In order to control the environment, statutes must be enacted and enforced to protect the population from degradation. The protection of the environment is paramount throughout all disciplines, and laws are enacted within each discipline. The statutes relating to environmental health are distributed all through the codes of California. Therefore, it is difficult to find or review the statutes. Compiling the statutes into a single reference book would facilitate locating and reviewing them, and would provide uniformity. Before compilation can occur, an index must be developed to categorize the specific statutes. The development of an index of public health statutes relating to environmental health requires certain criteria. The areas of environmental health must be placed in some logical sequence; the initial headings must direct the reader to the category. A review of established indexes must be made to determine how an index can be used to categorize the statutes. A knowledge of the statutes is necessary in order to develop the specific headings. The headings should be general in nature, yet specific enough to facilitate finding the statute. The index must be expandable for future use. Terminology must be closely scrutinized so that the reader will interpret the word as the writer intended the word to be used. In such an index covering two fields--environmental health and law--some sort of validation is necessary from both professions.