Children And Environmental Toxins

More than 80,000 new chemicals have been developed and released into the global environment during the last four decades. Today the World Health Organization attributes more than one-third of all childhood deaths to environmental causes, and as rates of childhood disease skyrocket -- autism, asthma, ADHD, obesity, diabetes, and even birth defects -- it raises serious, difficult questions around how the chemical environment is impacting children's health. Children and Environmental Toxins: What Everyone Needs to Know® offers an accessible guide to understanding and identifying the potential sources of harm in a child's environment. Written by experts in pediatrics and environmental health and formatted in an easy to follow question-and-answer format, it offers parents, care providers, and activists a reliable introduction to a hotly debated topic. As the burdens of environmental toxins and disease continue to defy borders, this book provides a new benchmark to understanding the potential threats in our environment and food. No parent or care provider should be without it.

Presents the report of a series of hearings on environmental toxins and the risks to children, examining the best available evidence about children's vulnerability to environmental toxins and the concern about child health and safety. Some of the toxins discussed are lead poisoning, pesticides and their residues, asbestos in schools, and other agriculturally related toxins effecting children in rural and low-income areas.

This title includes a number of Open Access chapters. This collection of timely chapters presents a nuanced study of environmental toxins and the risks they pose to children’s development. The book details the impact of a number of commonplace environmental toxins, focusing on everyday exposure to tobacco smoke, lead, pesticides, and flame retardants. There is growing recognition that the impact of the environment on children’s health is of critical importance for both current and future generations. In the last half-century, thousands of chemicals have been introduced into the environment with limited—although growing—research on the consequences of exposure. It has been proven that children and adolescents are far more vulnerable than adults to these environmental toxins by virtue of children’s behaviors, higher metabolic rate, greater skin area relative to their volume, and still developing organ systems. Increased number of ear infections, poor asthma control, and learning disabilities are just some of the adverse outcomes that have been noted. This well-researched book: • Presents detailed information on why children are more vulnerable to everyday toxins • Discusses why new approaches to medical care are necessary that take into account children's unique physiology and development • Offers well-defined research on tobacco smoking on prenatal development as well as children’s exposure to tobacco smoke during their early years, particularly the evidence of asthma and asthma-like symptoms • Examines the possible health effects of children born to mothers living in areas of natural gas development • Looks at the health effects of childhood exposure to environmental lead, using GIS technology to study areas of potentially high lead concentrations • Discusses the possible effects of agricultural pesticides on children’s health during gestation • Presents studies on prenatal and adolescent exposure to PBDEs used as flame retardants in many household and commercial products to prevent fire This valuable book, edited by a pediatric clinician at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, provides a wealth of information on this important issue. The book concludes with an article by the World Health Organization, which offers a practical and comprehensive summary of a series of action steps. The book aims to create greater awareness to spur additional research, provide vital information to clinicians, and send a powerful message to government officials, putting pressure on them to develop policies that improve the quality of the environment and spare children the detrimental effects of such exposures.

Identifies critical pollutants in today's environment, including lead, asbestos, PCBs, and pesticides, and explains how to minimize children's exposure, evaluate risks, and ensure community compliance with cleanup laws.

We are all shaped by our genetic inheritance and by the environment we live in. Indeed, the argument about which of these two forces, nature or nurture, predominates has been raging for decades. But what about our very first environment--the prenatal world where we exist for nine months between conception and birth and where we are more vulnerable than at any other point in our lives? In More Than Genes, Dan Agin marshals new scientific evidence to argue that the fetal environment can be just as crucial as genetic hard-wiring or even later environment in determining our intelligence and behavior. Stress during pregnancy, for example, puts women at far greater risk of bearing children prone to anxiety disorders. Nutritional deprivation during early fetal development may elevate the risk of late onset schizophrenia. And exposure to a whole host of environmental toxins--methylmercury, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins, pesticides, ionizing radiation, and most especially lead--as well as maternal use of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, or cocaine can have impacts ranging from mild cognitive impairment to ADHD, autism, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders. Agin argues as well that differences in IQ among racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups are far more attributable to higher levels of stress and chemical toxicity in inner cities--which seep into the prenatal environment and compromise the health of the fetus--than to genetic inheritance. The good news is that the prenatal environment is malleable, and Agin suggests that if we can abandon the naive idea of "immaculate gestation," we can begin to protect fetal development properly. Cogently argued, thoroughly researched, and accessibly written, More Than Genes challenges many long-held assumptions and represents a huge step forward in our understanding of the origins of human intelligence and behavior.