Speaking Out: Children's health concerns are constantly changing

By MARIA MINNO

(The writer is environmental chair of the Alachua County PTA.)

Children's health issues are changing. For our grandparents' generation, the concern was about surviving the childhood diseases that our children are vaccinated against. Today's threats to children's health are different.

They may not be as deadly, but they are more complicated and subtle than the primary childhood diseases of the past. Allergies, ADD, autism, asthma, and childhood cancer are much more prevalent now, yet the reasons for this are not clear.

Our world is changing. Our entire environment, from the plants, animals, and micro-organisms we are in contact with, to the air we breathe, our water, and soil, have all changed immensely in the past century.

When I was growing up, environmentalists warned that habitat destruction was driving species to extinction and degrading natural resources. They told us if we didn't change how we lived, our environment would soon be so polluted that our health would suffer.

Unfortunately, that day has come. Children's health is more and more mpacted by environmental factors. More than 70,000 chemicals are legally produced in the United States alone. From 1940 to 1980, synthetic chemical production increased from 1.3 billion pounds to 320 billion.

After they are produced and used, synthetic chemicals don't just disappear. Some may break down into different chemicals that are more or less toxic. Others bio-accumulate into the food chain. Many have become ubiquitous in our environment worldwide. Traces of toxic synthetic chemicals can be found in all humans all over the world, and in animals, too.

While more chemicals enter the environment, various childhood diseases have changed dramatically in relative significance. The occurrence of some types of childhood cancers has risen significantly over the past 15 years. Acute lymphocytic leukemia is up 10 percent. Cancers of the brain and other sites in the central nervous system are up more than 30 percent.

Childhood asthma, too, has increased by more than 40% in the past 20 years, affecting more than 4.2 million children under the age of 18 nationwide. Although there are no registries for learning disabilities and attention deficit disorders among children, there has been growing attention in recent years to an apparent increase in both.

And finally, a substantial body of scientific research demonstrates that synthetic chemicals can disrupt the hormone function in humans and animals.

Although much remains to be learned about the causes of childhood cancer, asthma, learning disabilities and attention deficit disorders, environmental factors are suspected to play an important role.

Some of the worst known environmental threats to children's health are: lead, air pollution, pesticides, radiation, and drinking water contamination. On the horizon, endocrine disruptors loom as possible factors in a number of other health problems. Endocrine disruptors mimic the body's hormones, and have been shown to disrupt reproductive and hormone systems in wildlife.

Lead has long been known to be toxic, and recentl research has confirmed that it can cause permanent damage to a child's nervous system and can affect children's health even at very low levels. Many other toxicants are also being implicated in causing adverse health effects in children. Children are exposed to these chemicals in their food, their water, and in the air they breathe.

Children are especially vulnerable to environmental factors. Their physical and mental development is exceedingly delicate from conception through adolescence. Children are not just "little adults," and this is particularly true when it comes to environmental exposures.

Before they are born, children are physiologically very different from adults. Yet they can be exposed to environmental toxins in their mother's womb, which can permanently damage their health and impair their mental function. A wide variety of dangerous toxic chemicals cross the placenta, including lead, polychlorinated biphenyls, methylmercury, ethanol, and nicotine from environmental tobacco smoke.

Children are continually growing and changing, with cells multiplying at an incredible rate, and organ systems in varying degrees of development and function. At birth, their nervous, respiratory, reproductive, and immune systems are still not fully developed.

Young children breathe more rapidly and take in more air, food, and liquid in proportion to their body weight than do adults. Furthermore, their bodies metabolize at a higher rate. They absorb nutrient differently than do adults, so they can absorb toxins more rapidly than adults.

Children are sometimes less able to excrete or detoxify chemicals than adults, yet their behaviors may increase their exposure to toxins in the environment. Very young children spend hours close to the ground, where they can be exposed to toxics in dust, soil, carpets, and to vapors in low-lying layers of air. A young child will normally pick things up and put them in his or her mouth, providing an avenue for exposure to toxicants such as lead in paint dust or chips, as well as to pesticide residues. Even playing outdoors may bring children into increased contact with toxins.

Children eat differently than adults, too. Proportional to its body weight, the average one-year-old eats two to seven times more grapes, bananas, pears, carrots and broccoli than an adult. As a result, children will be exposed to anything the rest of us ingest, but at a greater rate, including toxins such as pesticides, heavy metals, and nitrates.

Environmental hazards are not bound by county, state, or national borders. All children are affected. Contaminants reach air, water, soil, and food throughout the world. However, in this country, children living in poverty, and children in racial or ethnic communities are at disproportionate risk.

According to 1994 Census data, 21%, or more than 14 million children in the US live in poverty. Poverty compounds the problems of toxic exposures because it is often associated with inadequate housing, poor nutrition, and limited access to health care. A primary source of exposure to lead, for example, is from flaking lead-based paint, a condition more common in older housing often found in low-income neighborhoods.

The fact that a higher number of minority families live in an area make it more likely to be the site of a toxic waste facility. A summary of every published study carried out in the U.S. through 1991 found that across a range of hazards and study sample sizes, environmental hazards are inequitably distributed. Of the 22 studies, 21 found that environmental discrimination occurs along race or class lines. Among the nine studies which separated race from class, seven found that race was a better predictor of exposure to environmental hazards than income.

Children face many environmental hazards, and little is important that parents and others who work with children help them avoid dangerous exposures. It is also important for people to keep an open mind about symptoms, and talk about exposures and safety, so others can also be aware.

Parents and professionals who work with children, or anyone interested in learning more may want to join children's environmental health experts at the first Children's Environmental Health Conference sponsored by the Florida PTA, Alachua County Council of PTAs, Florida Organic Growers, and the League of Environmental Educators in Florida.

The conference will be held on Saturday, September 21, 2002, from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm at Littlewood Elementary School, 812 NW 34th Street, in Gainesville. Featured speakers are Lou and Elizabeth Guillette, on their groundbreaking research on pesticides in the environment and their effects on children.

The cost is $25 per person, and includes lunch provided by the Neighborhood Nutrition Network. To register, contact Florida PTA, 1747 Orlando Central Parkway, Orlando FL 32809, telephone (407)855-7604 or (800)373-5782, or e-mail info@floridapta.org. For more information on the conference, contact 600 NW 35th Terrace, Gainesville FL 32607-2441, telephone (352)375-3028 or e-mail minno@gator.net