Playing in the sand.

Children were a common theme for the impressionist painter Mary Cassatt. Her "Children on the Beach" depicts a placid scene around the turn of the century. With buckets and small shovels, two little girls in beach dresses, one with a sun bonnet, make an attempt to change the sandy landscape; in the background sailboats float serenely in the calm waters. On viewing the painting, we feel that everything is right with the world. If only it were true. We love our children; we pamper them; we indulge them; we educate them-but we also pollute their environment. Exposure to toxicants is a daily experience for our children. The exposures occur in ways in which we often are not aware. Children play in sand that may contain toxicants of unknown origin. Children play on the lawn and, as children will do, end up with soil on their hands and in their mouths. The lawn may have been recently treated with fertilizers , herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides. The soil may be contaminated with lead and mercury. They play on rugs that have been sprayed with pesticides to kill the fleas brought in by the family pet. As they crawl and waddle around, they inhale paint fumes when we redecorate our homes. Because of their short stature, they are closer to the floor and inhale the more dense vapors at concentrations much higher than those that we ourselves inhale. We smoke cigarettes; they breath our smoke. They eat foods that have been treated to maintain freshness and often contain incidental quantities of agricultural chemicals. While the quantities of these chemicals are not normally a problem for adults, the quantities may become a problem for children. Because children have a higher ratio of food intake to body weight, children ingest relatively larger quantities of preservatives and agricultural chemical residues than adults. As important as the route of exposure is, the unique sensitivity of children to toxicants has often been overlooked. Through the years research has focused on the evaluation of toxicity of chemicals to young adult males with an average weight of 70 kg. The choice of males for study is not surprising given the social climate of the past. But now with heightened awareness of discrimination, the sophistication of toxi-cokinetic modeling, and the advent of new methods in molecular biology , the unique susceptibility of individual genders and races are being explored. The importance …