Health and Enviroment

Health
Medical care in our country is free of charge, although there are now many private doctors. We don’t pay for prescriptions or for some medicines. But for other medicines, especially for those from abroad, we must pay.

When the woman is expecting a baby the state takes care of her and her child. There are medical check-ups before the child is born and maternity ward services. As to financial help after giving birth, mothers get benefits for three years after the birth of a child. for the first 26 weeks she gets 90 per cent of her pay and for the rest of her maternity leave she gets fewer benefits.

Then comes medical and social care during the pre-school and school age, up to the old. The Health insurance system is undergoing some changes at present. Employers pay health insurance for their employees but everybody can pay extra money for their health insurance. Private people must pay their health insurance themselves.

If we fall ill or if we have an accident, we go to the Health Centre, Policlinic, Hospital or to some Private doctor. Of course that we can choose our doctors.

There are various types of medical treatment for our different types of troubles. Doctors may ask you to strip to the waist before he examines your chest and throat. They check our blood pressure, feel the pulse or put our blood or urine through lab-tests to take for example a blood-count. Doctors usually prescribe some medicines to us - pills, antibiotics, gargling, eye-wash, sleeping pills, etc.

There are various types of physicians who treat various diseases and disorders. They are e. g. dentists, surgeons, interns, oculists, pediatricians, gyneacologists, psychiatrists, dermatologists, ear and throat specialists, orthopaedic specialists etc.

Each person should undergo a regular check-up at least once a year. We usually go to see our doctor when we don’t feel well or have a temperature. We can suffer from various illnesses such as measles, chickenpox, mumps, scarlet-fever, otitis. Usually we suffer from common infections such as cold, flu, angina, indigestion, etc. In such cases we stay in bed, drink herbal teas, take pills, drops or vitamins.

The situation may sometimes be more serious and needs special treatment in the hospital, e. g. heart attack, appendicitis, breaking an arm or leg, poisoning, or some real dangerous disease such as tuberculosis, anaemia, pneumonia, leukemia, hepatitis etc. It is the same situation with all possible operations and surgeon interferences. It is enough to say that there are still diseases which cannot be cured such as cancer or AIDS.

The true is that prevention is better than a cure. We should try to live a healthy way of life, which means we should have a good proportion of work to leisure time, between our sleep and up time, to keep our mental state in order. We should practise sports, we should eat healthy food with lots of vitamins, we should not smoke, drink too much alcohol, become drug addicts or change our intimate friends too often.

Environment
Civilization has brought people many advantages but its products also pollute the environment in which we live. Britain is protecting the environment against pollution from industry and other sources for more than a century, while in the Czech Republic we are only at the beginning. Pollution affects air, water, land, forests, people, animals and plants.

Air pollution is the biggest problem in large cities and in areas with concentrated industrial production. Smoke contains harmful substances which are produced by coal-fired power stations and industrial plants burning fossil fuels. Some substances can cause major changes in the environment which can lead to climate changes. These substances mix with water vapour in the atmosphere and form sulphuric acid and nitric acid. Sunlight turns these acids into poisonous oxidants which fall in the form of acid rain onto trees and kill them. Trees are important for our life because they are the lungs of our planet. They give us oxygen.

The next air pollution is from road traffic. In 1974 the first commercial autocatalysts in the world were made in Britain. Lead emissions can fall if we reduce lead content in petrol and encourage the use of unleaded petrol. All new cars are also built to run on unleaded petrol and developed countries use a tax advantage to favour the use of it.