| |
|
Published in Spring 2001
|
Making the North American environment safer for our children
|
| |
Ruth Grier, a former environment minister and later a health minister for Ontario, makes the case for CEC’s continent-wide children's health and environment initiative.
|
| |
|
By Ruth Grier
|
| |
|
|
The invitation to participate in CEC's Symposium on Children's Health and the Environment in North America began my involvement with this fascinating and vital subject. Nearly one hundred scientists, policy-makers, child health advocates and environmentalists from all three North American countries gathered in Toronto in May 2000, to share recent scientific findings and engage in active debate on environmental threats to children's health in North America, the present regulatory framework in this area, and emerging policy directions.
A month later I was on a plane to Dallas where, together with colleagues from the US and Mexico, I had the great honor of reporting on the outcomes of the symposium to the CEC Council at their annual session. During that frank and open discussion, I was heartened by the ministers' commitment to develop a cooperative North American agenda to protect children from environmental threats, and their decision to form a blue-ribbon Expert Advisory Board to guide and advise them.
During my twenty-five years in elected office, I have always been concerned about the very real threat that environmental degradation poses to human health. The importance of a safe environment to children's health cannot be overemphasized. Children are not just little adults. Their bodies undergo dynamic, often rapid development, from conception onward through infancy, childhood and adolescence. Per unit of body weight, children eat more, drink more, and breathe more than adults, thereby increasing their exposure to whatever contaminants might be in the food, water or air. Their behavior (e.g., crawling, putting items in their mouths) and natural curiosity often subject them to a higher risk of exposure to harmful substances in the places where they live, learn and play.
Technological developments over the past fifty years have dramatically altered our global environment.
 |
Adding to ongoing child health challenges of microbial water contamination and communicable diseases, there is ever-increasing evidence that the pollutants we put into our environment, toxic contaminants in our food, pesticides we put on our parks and lawns, and some of the vast array of chemical-containing products that we are exposed to as consumers, are threatening the health of children. Some effects are well documented. We know that exposure to lead can permanently impair a child's ability to learn and that poor air quality can exacerbate asthma and contribute to other respiratory ailments. We understand that cigarette smoke, asbestos, benzene, formaldehyde and numerous other substances can cause cancer. We have heard the statistics on the hundreds of children that are poisoned each year by accidentally ingesting toxic household products.
But it is the things that are not yet well understood that may be cause for even greater concern. Scientists are now beginning to make links between low levels of exposure to neurotoxic chemicals and the increasing number of children diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, autism and other developmental disabilities. CEC's own Taking Stock reports document the release into our environment each year of hundreds of thousands of kilograms of chemicals defined by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as carcinogens. In 1997, the National Cancer Institute in the United States cited data showing that there had been a significant increase in childhood cancers over the previous 25 years, including a 27 percent rise in leukemia and a 39 percent rise in brain cancer (US EPA conference on Preventable Causes of Cancer in Children, 15-16 September 1997). How can we be sure there is no connection?
There is growing concern about persistent organic pollutants-such as the 'dirty dozen' targeted through the recently agreed international POPs treaty-and the potential for some such substances to disrupt normal functioning of the body's endocrine (hormone) system and impair development.
The mechanisms that trigger these often subtle effects are not well understood. For most toxic substances, it is assumed that by lowering levels of exposure sufficiently, adverse health risks will be reduced to acceptable levels. But with some, that appears not to be the case. Even the most minute levels of exposure may be enough to cause irreversible damage or impede normal development.
What will be the long-term impacts on our society of generations of children increasingly challenged by development and learning disabilities? What are the costs of the alarming increases in asthma incidence? How can we adequately protect our children from environmental threats? What does all of this mean for our approach to public policy?
While some progress has recently been made, we generally fail to take children's special vulnerabilities into account in our standards-setting and risk management decisions. North America's regulatory model is largely based on chemical-by-chemical risk assessments that evaluate chemicals for well-understood health endpoints with relatively little focus on less well-charted risks, such as developmental effects. We are even less able to predict the health impacts of the complex mixtures of substances we encounter on a daily basis, let alone the cumulative effects over a lifetime.
Until we embrace a truly preventive approach to chemical regulation and environmental protection, we will continue responding to the effects of damaging substances in our environment and food supply after the fact, and usually much too late. The integration of precaution into our policies and decision-making is key to this vital shift. Adopted as part of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development in 1992, the precautionary principle calls for preventive actions, even in the absence of scientific certainty about cause-and-effect. In the European Union, this principle is accorded official status within the EU Environmental Health Policy. As citizens of North America, we should push more for a policy framework firmly grounded on the twin principles of precaution and prevention. After all, the decisions we take today will affect our children, their children and generations to come.
CEC's initiative on children's health and the environment presents a real opportunity for North American society. The Council Resolution sets forth some good short- and medium-term goals, focusing on asthma, and the effects of lead and other toxic substances and ensuring parents' right to know about the presence of substances that may harm their children. While these are important initial steps, there is much more to be done. All of us-in our capacities as citizens, parents, educators, professionals, experts, business leaders and advocates-need to continue to nurture this fledgling initiative into a forward-looking agenda for action that will get at some of the broader policy issues and thereby contribute to meaningful, durable change. We can assist this process by ensuring that in our own spheres of influence we apply a children's environment/health focus to all our work.
|
Top
Ruth Grier 