Protecting Children from Environmental Toxins

0203 Epidemics of overt toxicity following widespread environmental contamination from commercial toxins heralded the discovery of children’s enhanced vulnerability to lead, methyl mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and tobacco [1,2,3,4,5] (Box 1). Over the past three decades, researchers have found that remarkably low-level exposures to these toxins are linked with less overt symptoms of toxicity— intellectual impairments, behavioral problems, spontaneous abortions, or preterm births [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14, 15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27, 28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40]. Moreover, there is emerging evidence that decrements in intellectual abilities and low birth weight linked with lead or tobacco are, for a given increment of exposure, greater at lower levels than those found at higher levels [10,41,42,43]. The consequences of exposure to many other chemicals or mixtures of chemicals, such as insecticides— chemicals oftentimes specifi cally designed to be toxic—are largely unknown [33,34,35,44]. Many of these chemicals or their metabolites are routinely found in the blood and body fl uids of pregnant women and children [45].