Environmental Pollution: An Under-recognized Threat to Children’s Health, Especially in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Conclusions Patterns of disease are changing rapidly in LMICs. Pollution-related chronic diseases are becoming more common. This shift presents a particular problem for children, who are proportionately more heavily exposed than are adults to environmental pollutants and for whom these exposures are especially dangerous. Better quantification of environmental exposures and stepped-up efforts to understand how to prevent exposures that cause disease are needed in LMICs and around the globe. To confront the global problem of disease caused by pollution, improved programs of public health monitoring and environmental protection are needed in countries at every level of economic development. Pollution control strategies and technologies that have been developed and successfully deployed in HICs need to be transferred to LMICs, and their implementation must be adequately funded. Pollution control strategies in HICs have succeeded by controlling exposures at the source. For instance, lead has been removed from gasoline (Grosse et al. 2002), asbestos use has been sharply curtailed and banned in some countries (Frank and Joshi 2014), and air and water pollution have been reduced. Highly toxic pesticides have been replaced. These actions have produced tangible benefits for human health and the environment. Such strategies can also succeed in LMICs, as evidenced by experience with reducing lead in gasoline, with resulting declines in children’s blood lead levels in countries such as ...
Source: EHP Research - Category: Environmental Health Authors: Tags: Brief Communication March 2016 Source Type: research