Abstract
Background
Children's environmental health (CEH), the branch of pediatrics that studies the influence
of the environment on children's health, has grown substantially in the past 3 decades
and become an increasingly visible and important component of pediatric medicine.
Goals
To trace the historical origins of CEH; to identify factors responsible for its recent
growth.
Findings
CEH has historical roots in toxicology, epidemiology, and occupational medicine. It
arose in the second half of the 20th century through a melding of insights from pediatric
toxicology, nutritional epidemiology, and social science research. Convergent research
in these 3 fields has documented children's unique sensitivities to chemical, nutritional,
and psychosocial hazards during windows of vulnerability in early development and
has shown that early-life exposures can produce disease and disability in childhood
and across the life span. Key events in the development of CEH were: 1) formation
by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1957 of a committee on environmental health
that has nurtured the growth of the field for 5 decades and evolved into the Council
on Environmental Health; 2) observations made in the 1980s that nutritional deficiency
in utero increased risk for adult-onset obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease—work
that led to the hypothesis of the developmental origins of health and disease; 3)
social science research showing that early exposure to psychosocial stress and trauma
increases risk for chronic illness; and 4) publication in 1993 by the National Academy
of Sciences of a report, Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children, which elevated awareness among national policy makers of children's vulnerability
to toxic hazards, moved US environmental policy toward protection of children's health,
and catalyzed research investment in CEH in the United States and globally.
Conclusions
CEH has made substantial progress but faces emerging challenges, including new chemicals
and pesticides; increasing movement of polluting industries to poor countries where
environmental and public health protections are few; and global climate change. In
the future, CEH will require continued investment in research and education and will
need to adopt an increasingly global perspective.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: October 21, 2015
Accepted:
October 16,
2015
Received:
March 16,
2015
Footnotes
The author declares that he has no conflict of interest.
Identification
Copyright
© 2016 Academic Pediatric Association. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
