AT3 Instructions This assessment involves you assuming the role of an Environmental Health Officer working for the City of Melbourne. You will conduct an environmental health risk assessment involving...

Introduction
Housing plays a very crucial role as it is directly associated with the wellbeing of the Australians health. “Adequate housing is essential for decent health, education, employment and community safety outcomes” (FaCSIA 2007a). Poor housing conditions are linked with variety of health related problems which includes respiratory infections, mental stress or disorder, increase rates of violence, asthma and physical injuries. The city of Melbourne is growing at an increasing rate. According to reports since 2001, there has been quite an increase and has approximately doubled over 100000 residents in Melbourne due to the fast lifestyle, conveniences, services ,high standard of living, work opportunities and education system. It has been estimated that by 2031 there will be additional 42000 homes which will be constructed within the municipality to provide shelter to additional 80000 people.
Projected growth of households, families and population, 2001–26
The following is quoted from the FaHCSIA website.
“Improving housing conditions is essential to achieving improvements in Indigenous health, education and employment to help close the gap in life outcomes between Indigenous and other Australians.
Under the National Indigenous Reform Agreement, ‘Healthy Homes’ is one of seven inter-connected ‘building blocks’ — or priority action areas — that underpin the Closing the Gap strategy agreed by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG).
The Australian Government has committed $5.5 billion over ten years to 2018 under the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing: 
· significant overcrowding
· homelessness
· poor housing conditions
· the severe housing shortage in remote Indigenous communities.”
The goals of the policy are good but the implementation is yet to become successful.
Overcrowding
Overcrowding or crowding is a situation where more people are located within a given space than is considered tolerable from a safety and health perspective. The World Health Organisation(WHO) expert committee states that: “One of the fundamentals of a healthful residential environment should be a safe and structurally sound, adequately maintained, separate, self-contained dwelling unit for each household if so desired, with each dwelling unit providing at least the following:
• a sufficient number of rooms, usable floor area and volume of enclosed space to satisfy human requirements for health and for family life, consistent with the prevailing cultural and social pattern of that region and so utilised that living or sleeping rooms are not overcrowded
• At least a minimum degree of desired privacy:
- For individual persons within the household
- For members of the household against undue disturbance by external factors
• Suitable separation of rooms as used for:
- sleeping by adolescent and adult members of the opposite sex except husband and wife
- Housing of domestic animals apart from the living room of the dwelling unit.
These needs can be expressed in terms of space requirements to perform household activities and/or occupancy standards.”
World health Organisation has identified that overcrowding and inadequate shelter are the main factors which contributes in the transmission of the diseases leading to epidemic outbreak. As outbreak of a disease is more is places where the population density is high. Some of the features of poor household condition comprise of lack of clean water, no proper arrangement for waste disposal, damp houses, old and dirty carpeting and frequent incursion of rats and insects. These all lead to spread of bacteria and viruses in the food leading to infectious disease (Mood EW, Howard M, 1993). Inadequate ventilation and overcrowding are the contributing factors for increase in moisture inside the house leading to damp condition which becomes the breeding environment for viruses, moulds, mites etc. Again, many other studies also established that damp and mouldy houses give rise to frequent nausea, headache, fever and sore throat (Platt SD, Martin CJ, Hunt SM, Lewis CW BMJ, 1989).Therefore, substandard houses are a main reservoir for toxic chemicals, dust and allergens. Exposure to these can result in respiratory, allergic, hematologic illnesses. Let us discuss two main infectious diseases that can occur due to overcrowding:
Tuberculosis (TB)
Where people live and work in poorly ventilated conditions TB is more likely to spread in those places. Many researches have also revealed the fact that tuberculosis is related to...