Tourism and the environment, the other side of the coin

The rapid growth in tourism has lead to an increased need for suitable health education designed to ensure safe and healthy travel. While this advice usually concentrates on appropriate behaviour and preventable infections, it rarely includes the environmental health hazards travellers are exposed to. This article attempts to demonstrate the wide range of such health hazards. It is then argued that the current approach to risk management and health education may be based on a framework which ignores the strong interdependence between environment and humans as proposed, for example, by Beck, and hence fails to develop strategies which can minimize environmental harm to travellers. The need of a new approach is discussed to allow innovative research which will provide a better knowledge base for such strategies.