Physicians get help understanding pesticide poisoning

It's a weighty acknowledgment that conditions ranging from asthma to sudden infant death syndrome may have environmental causes.

Subject:   U.S. News: Pediatricians gain new diagnostic tool (10/18/99)
Date:        Tue, 13 Jun 2000 07:52:13 -0400
From:        Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization:     Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)

To:     Lyndon Hawkins <hawkins@empm.cdpr.ca.gov>
          Senior Research Scientist
          State of California, Department of Pesticide Regulation - Integrated Pest Management

Dear Lyndon, I thought you might be interested in the following U.S. News and World Reports article entitled: Assessing children's toxic risks - Pediatricians gain new diagnostic tool - BY JIM MORRIS.

It's known as the Green Book–officially, the Handbook of Pediatric Environmental Health–and its release represents a milestone of sorts. Beginning this week, all 55,000 members of the American Academy of Pediatrics will be offered free copies of the 400-page tome to put on their shelves alongside the Red Book, their trusted reference on infectious diseases. It's a weighty acknowledgment that conditions ranging from asthma to sudden infant death syndrome may have environmental causes.

The Green Book's publication is the latest coup in the decades-old drive to get physicians and policy makers thinking about the effects of toxic compounds on kids. Although alarms were sounded in the early 1970s about lead poisoning, childhood cancer, and birth defects, "all of this remained very much at the edge of pediatrics until a few years ago," says Philip J. Landrigan, director of the Center for Children's Health and the Environment at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. "Now there's a lot of momentum attached to this issue, and some serious money is being put into research." In 1996, Congress passed the landmark Food Quality Protection Act, which instructs the Environmental Protection Agency to give special consideration to children when setting exposure limits for pesticides. And in 1998, the federal government established children's health centers at eight prominent universities; five are searching for environmental causes of asthma, three for the origins of learning disabilities and other neurobehavioral disorders.

The Green Book tackles subjects such as mercury poisoning, which is more common and harder to diagnose than one might think. Characterized by pink rashes and excruciating limb pain, it "can look an awful lot like a viral disease," says Ruth Etzel, the book's editor and a pediatrician with the U.S. Public Health Service. "Mercury is extremely toxic. Some kids bring it home from school science classes–they love the look and feel of it–and heat it and breathe the vapors. They develop very, very severe lung damage." Others consume mercury-tainted fish or are exposed during Santeria rituals (religious ceremonies, originating in Cuba, in which mercury is sprinkled about a room). "We now have a huge body of literature on this sort of thing," says Etzel, who notes that the Academy of Pediatrics helped get mercury banned from paints and is working to have it removed from vaccines. "We're putting it all in one place so it can be a handy reference for clinicians."

Flea dipping. At the same time, there's ample room for new research. Scientists at Mississippi State University, for example, are studying dogs' flea collars and dips as possible sources of human pesticide poisoning. Veterinary students petted the canine subjects with white gloves, the residues were analyzed, and some of the readings came up high. The next step is to collect urine samples from the dogs' owners–children in particular, who are more apt than adults to cuddle and wrestle with pets. "We don't know how to translate the glove numbers into actual human absorption," explains principal investigator Janice Chambers.

Some scientists believe that pesticides and other contaminants play a largely overlooked role in child behavior. Aggression and attention-deficit disorder could be signs of lead poisoning. There may be a link between autism and prenatal exposure to polluted drinking water. Similarly, exposure in utero to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)–banned compounds once used in electrical equipment that are still found in fish and other foods–may affect reading comprehension and attention span. Landrigan points out that fewer than 20 percent of the 70,000 synthetic chemicals to which children may be exposed have been tested for developmental toxicity.

"When you think about environmental hazards, kids are just different from adults," says Richard Jackson, director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "They eat, drink, and breathe three times as much as an adult on a weight basis. They tend to be more aggressively and intimately involved in their environments." And yet in many ways, Jackson says, society has done a better job of protecting endangered species than it has "the most sensitive members of our human population: our kids."

Well Lyndon, How long will you ignore the fact that your "registered" POISONS are not "protecting" us?

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