Trials and Tribulations of Protecting Children from Environmental Hazards Bruce P. Lanphear,1 Jerome Paulson,2 and Sandra Beirne3 1Cincinnati Children's Environmental Health Center, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Departments of Pediatrics and of Environmental Health, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio; 2Mid-Atlantic Center for Children's Health and the Environment, George Washington University, School of Public Health and Health Services, Washington, DC; 3University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, New York Abstract Society is increasingly aware of the profound impact that the environment has on children's health. Not surprisingly, there is increasing public scrutiny about children's exposures to environmental hazards, especially for disadvantaged children. These trends underscore the ethical imperative to develop a framework to protect children from environmental hazards. Such a framework must include regulations to test new chemicals and other potential hazards before they are marketed, a strategy to conduct research necessary to protect children from persistent hazards that are widely dispersed in their environment, stronger regulatory mechanisms to eliminate human exposures to recognized or suspected toxicants, and guidelines about the ethical conduct of research and the role of experimental trials that test the efficacy and safety of interventions to prevent or ameliorate children's exposure to persistent toxicants or hazards that are widely dispersed in their environment. Key words: assent, children, consent, controls, environmental exposure, ethics, health, prevention, policy, research. Environ Health Perspect 114: 1609–1612 (2006) . doi:10.1289/ehp.9001 available via http://dx.doi.org/ [Online 14 August 2006] This article is part of the mini-monograph "Ethical Issues in Pediatric Environmental Health Research." Address correspondence to B.P. Lanphear, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, 3333 Burnet Ave., Cincinnati, OH 45229-3039 USA. Telephone: (513) 636-3778. Fax: (513) 636-4402. E-mail: bruce.lanphear@chmcc.org We acknowledge the comments of the participants in the Workshop on Ethical Issues on Children's Environmental Health, Children's Environmental Health Network, Washington, DC, 5 March 2004. This work was supported by National Institutes of Health and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grant PO1-ES11261 (B.P.L.) . The authors declare they have no competing financial interests. Received 11 January 2006 ; accepted 13 July 2006. The full version of this article is available for free in HTML or PDF formats. |