[The Free Trade Agreement and environmental health in Mexico].
This work offers an overview of the state of the art and future state of environmental health in our country from a viewpoint of the impact of the commercial opening established in the Free Trade Agreement among Mexico, the USA, and Canada. In the first section of this work, we analyze the expected economic changes resulting from the implementation of the FTA and foretells the way in which those changes will influence the present environmental and epidemiologic profiles of this country in the medium and long term. The main changes predicted by the analysis are, in the epidemiologic context, the acceleration of the transference of occupational, consumption, environmental and population risks, characteristic of industrialized countries, to the country's polarized epidemiologic profile; and, in the environmental context, a transition consisting of a broadening and composition of the spectrum of pollutants, including and important lagging of bacteriologic control. The second section offers an analysis of the predicted response capacity facing the new environmental risk dynamics in the country, encompassing regulation, normativeness and enforcement of environmental and consumer protection, as well as obstacles found in health services to the implementation of surveillance, detection and treatment of health damages caused by environmental factors. The analysis of the organized social response to these problems discloses a relative flexibility of the normativeness and enforcement functions in comparison with our northern neighbors, a paramount factor for the possible transference of environmental risks, as well as the informational and research deficiency about environmental issues, basic elements for sustaining environmental health in the country, aiming at speeding up the development and transference of technologies for prevention, detection and management of environmental risks in the country, drawing upon the systematization of our experience and that of our neighbors. This speeding process ought to match, in the medium term, the velocity of risk transference produced by the commercial opening. In this way, the commercial integration of North America will become a favorable context for the development of the environmental health infrastructure of the country.
Hernández-Peña
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P
Departamento de Economía de la Salud, Escuela de Salud Pública de México (ESPM), Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública (INSP), Cuernavaca.
Gutiérrez-Zúñiga
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C
Zurutuza-Fernández
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R
Jiménez-González
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O
D002170:Canada; D003132:Commerce / Q000191:economics / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D003254:Consumer Advocacy; D004782:Environmental Health / Q000191:economics / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D004787:Environmental Pollution / Q000191:economics / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence / Q000517:prevention & control; D007391:International Cooperation; D008800:Mexico; D012924:Social Conditions; D014481:United States
Tratado de libre comercio y salud ambiental en México.