Environmental threats to children's health in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific

Our plain-English summary of Environmental threats to children's health in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific, by W.A. Suk, K.M. Ruchirawat, K. Balakrishnan, et al (Environmental Health Perspectives, 2003).

The study

• Authors: W.A. Suk, K.M. Ruchirawat, K. Balakrishnan, M. Berger, D. Carpenter, T. Damstra, J.P. de Garbino, D. Koh, P.J. Landrigan, I. Makalinao, P.D. Sly, Y. Xu, B.S. Zheng
• Journal: Environmental Health Perspectives
• Published: 2003;111(10):1340-7
• Type of article: Review
• Cited by: 52 articles, as counted by NIH iCite
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher · Free full text

Abstract

The Southeast Asia and Western Pacific regions contain half of the world's children and are among the most rapidly industrializing regions of the globe. Environmental threats to children's health are widespread and are multiplying as nations in the area undergo industrial development and pass through the epidemiologic transition. These environmental hazards range from traditional threats such as bacterial contamination of drinking water and wood smoke in poorly ventilated dwellings to more recently introduced chemical threats such as asbestos construction materials; arsenic in groundwater; methyl isocyanate in Bhopal, India; untreated manufacturing wastes released to landfills; chlorinated hydrocarbon and organophosphorous pesticides; and atmospheric lead emissions from the combustion of leaded gasoline. To address these problems, pediatricians, environmental health scientists, and public health workers throughout Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific have begun to build local and national research and prevention programs in children's environmental health. Successes have been achieved as a result of these efforts: A cost-effective system for producing safe drinking water at the village level has been devised in India; many nations have launched aggressive antismoking campaigns; and Thailand, the Philippines, India, and Pakistan have all begun to reduce their use of lead in gasoline, with resultant declines in children's blood lead levels. The International Conference on Environmental Threats to the Health of Children, held in Bangkok, Thailand, in March 2002, brought together more than 300 representatives from 35 countries and organizations to increase awareness on environmental health hazards affecting children in these regions and throughout the world. The conference, a direct result of the Environmental Threats to the Health of Children meeting held in Manila in April 2000, provided participants with the latest scientific data on children's vulnerability to environmental hazards and models for future policy and public health discussions on ways to improve children's health. The Bangkok Statement, a pledge resulting from the conference proceedings, is an important first step in creating a global alliance committed to developing active and innovative national and international networks to promote and protect children's environmental health.

In plain English

This article was a review, not a new study. The authors described environmental threats to children's health in the Southeast Asia and Western Pacific regions. They drew mainly on presentations at the International Conference on Environmental Threats to the Health of Children, held in Bangkok, Thailand, in March 2002. They reported that the two regions together contained 53.1% of the world's population and 52% of its children. Asbestos appeared only in passing. The authors listed asbestos construction materials and the importation of vast quantities of asbestos among the region's chemical threats, citing other work, and gave no asbestos data. Most of the review covered other hazards, including lead, pesticides, indoor smoke from cooking fuels, mercury, persistent organic pollutants, unsafe water and climate change. Citing one conference presentation, it reported that 22 of the 104 schoolchildren tested in a lead-polluted area of China had blood lead above 30 micrograms per deciliter. The authors described programs such as removing lead from gasoline and a safe-water system in India. They called for an international network of research centers and concluded that there is a critical lack of knowledge about environmental threats to children's health.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: Review, drawn primarily from discussions and proceedings of the March 2002 Bangkok conference
• Who was studied: Children in the Southeast Asia region (10 countries) and the Western Pacific region (34 countries); no study population of the authors' own
• Exposure: A range of environmental hazards: lead, pesticides, indoor air pollution from solid fuels, mercury, persistent organic pollutants, unsafe water, climate change and environmental tobacco smoke. Asbestos (construction materials, imports) is mentioned only as an example, with no fiber type, dose or data.
• Main results:
  • Asbestos construction materials were named among the more recently introduced chemical threats in the region. No asbestos exposure or disease data were presented.
  • Reported from a conference presentation (Ling 2002): in a lead-polluted area of China, 22 of the 104 schoolchildren aged 7 to 14 who were tested had blood lead levels above 30 (unit printed as 'µg/d'), and eight reached 45 to 75 µg/dL. A control area had 86 children.
  • Reported from a conference presentation (Khwaja 2002): among more than 900 healthy children in Pakistan, the overall mean blood lead levels were 22.8 plus or minus 3.30, 19.00 plus or minus 6.48, and 2.30 plus or minus 0.19 micrograms per deciliter. The last figure was for a rural site.
  • Lead content of gasoline in Pakistan was reported as 0.35 g/L, compared with maximum lead contents of 0.00 to 0.15 g/L in countries such as the United States.
  • An estimated 1.7 million children were reported to die each year because of unsafe water and poor sanitation and hygiene.
• The authors' conclusion: The authors proposed an international network of pediatric environmental health and disease prevention research centers. They stated that there is a critical lack of knowledge about environmental threats to children's health.

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• Environmental health of children — A.M. Dunn, C. Burns, et al. (2003)
• Environmental aftermath — L. Claudio (2001)
• Malignant pleural mesotheliomas: an environmental health risk in southeast Turkey — K.M. Müller, M. Fischer (2000)
• Sri Lanka: report on its children's environmental health — H. Galappaththi (2020)

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