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National Information
- Children's Health Protection
- Potential Environmental Hazards
- Trends
- What You Can Do
- Publications
- Grants & Funding
- Children's Health Month
- Healthy Schools
- Environmental Education
- Related EPA Activities
- Indoor Air Quality Tools for Schools
- Toxicity & Exposure Assessment for Children's Health
- Protecting Children From Pesticides
- Fish Advisories
- Resources for Health Care Providers
- America's Children and the Environment
- National Children's Study
- Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry - Children's Health
- National Institutes of Health - Children's Health
- Recent Product Recalls
- www.kids.gov
Live in southeastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and the Washington, DC area? Check current ground-level ozone and particulate (PM 2.5) levels.
Additional Information 
- The Mid-Atlantic Center for Children's Health and the Environment
- Center for Health, Environment and Justice
- Clean Air Council - Children's Env'l Health
- Partnership for Children's Health & the Environment
- Delaware Healthy Children Program
- District of Columbia - Children's Health
- Maryland - Just for Kids
- Pennsylvania - Infant & Children's Health
- Virginia - Child & Adolescent Health
- West Virginia - Maternal, Child and Family Health
On this page
- Why Children's Health is Important
- Major Environmental Concerns
- The Mid-Atlantic Center for Children's Health and the Environment
Why Children's Health is Important
Protecting children's health from environmental risks is fundamental to the EPA's mission. There are approximately 6.6 million children in EPA's mid-Atlantic Region (Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia). Although only 23% of the region's population, children are our future.
It's important that children have clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, safe food to eat, and a healthy environment to learn, grow and thrive. Children may be more vulnerable to some environmental risks than adults for several reasons:
- children's nervous, immune, digestive, and other systems are still developing and their ability to metabolize or inactivate toxicants may be different than adults
- children eat more food, drink more fluids, and breather more air in proportion to their body weight than adults, and
- children's behavior, such as crawling and placing objects in their mouths, may result in greater exposure to environmental contaminants
Major Environmental Concerns
For children in the mid-Atlantic region:
- air - indoor & outdoor
- asbestos
- asthma
- emerging chemicals
- lead
- mercury
- pesticides
- ultraviolet radiation
Mid-Atlantic Center for Children's Health and the Environment
The Mid-Atlantic Center for Children's Health and the Environment or MACCHE - is a Pediatric Health Specialty Unit for the mid-Atlantic region. It is funded through a cooperative agreement with the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and EPA.
The MACCHE serves as a resource to health care providers and the public on children's environmental health issues. The main activities are:
Consultations
The MACCHE responds to telephone calls from parents, health professionals, school personnel and others. The MACCHE also provides clinical consultation and evaluation of children with health problems that may be related to their environment, as needed, in the children's environmental health clinic located at the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC . The MACCHE also provides referrals to local pediatricians and occupational and environmental medicine physicians.
Education and Outreach
To increase the knowledge and awareness of children's environmental health issues among pediatricians and other health care professionals, the physicians and environmental health experts at the MACCHE speak at hospitals, conferences, schools and other public settings.