"Protecting Kids from Environmental Exposure
Children’s rapid development from before they are born through early childhood makes them more vulnerable to environmental exposures. Contact the experts at your nearest Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit (PEHSU) to learn how to protect your child from exposure to health hazards in the environment.
What do these situations have in common?
- You are renovating an older home. While you are sanding window frames, some paint dust and chips fall on the floor. Your toddler puts them in his mouth.
- You live near an abandoned old factory. Your child loves playing in the dirt—and you have caught her eating mud pies.
- You enjoy gardening and use pesticides to protect your garden. However, you are pregnant and wonder if pesticide exposure could harm your unborn child.
If you guessed that in each situation, children are exposed to harmful substances in their environments, you are right!
Greater Exposure Risk
Children are especially vulnerable to hazards because they are growing and developing so. Children’s age-appropriate behavior (like crawling) also exposes them to hazards. They crawl and play on the floor or in the yard where they can be exposed to harmful substances—and they put everything in their mouths.
Just their physical size puts children at greater risk of exposure. From birth, children breathe more air, drink more water, and eat more food per pound of body weight than adults. An infant’s breathing rate is more than twice that of an adult’s.
Children continue to be vulnerable as they go through the developmental changes of puberty.
In 2008, the U.S. economic cost for children’s environmental exposures was estimated at $76.6 billion. But has your child’s pediatrician ever talked to you about environmental exposures? Has your obstetrician ever taken an environmental history and asked you about exposures around you?.."
Kids and environmental exposure
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