Children’s environmental health in a 2005 textbook: the Mount Sinai chapter
Three researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York wrote the chapter on children for Howard Frumkin’s 2005 textbook Environmental Health: From Global to Local. A US EPA grant database lists the chapter among publications from Mount Sinai’s children’s centre.
What the study did and found
The record is the chapter “Children” by Maida Galvez, Joel Forman and Philip Landrigan, pages 805–845 of Environmental Health: From Global to Local, edited by Howard Frumkin and published by Jossey-Bass in 2005 (Galvez et al., 2005).
The chapter starts from the tens of thousands of synthetic chemicals invented since the 1950s, few of them tested for effects on child development, traces environmental paediatrics to outbreaks such as Minamata disease, and explains why children take in more per kilogram (Galvez et al., 2005).
It then covers the laws on pesticides in children’s diets of the 1990s and case studies on breast milk contaminants, pesticides, DEET and lead in older homes (Galvez et al., 2005).
Why it is cited
The one referring page recorded here is a US EPA grant database page listing publications of a birth-cohort subproject of Mount Sinai’s children’s centre. The chapter appears under “Book Chapter”, with a link to its Cabdirect abstract as the only online source.
The use is purely bibliographic, so nothing is overstated, although the chapter is a textbook overview rather than a report of the birth cohort’s results.
A 2006 review in Environmental Health Perspectives called the book a very useful reference but unsuitable as a textbook, and did not discuss this chapter.
Later papers by the chapter’s authors cover related ground: in 2010 Landrigan, Rauh and Galvez argued that children’s biology and patterns of exposure make them especially vulnerable to environmental injustice.
The topic today
By WHO’s estimate, the environment accounted for 1.7 million deaths of children under five in 2012 (World Health Organization, n.d.). CDC’s blood lead benchmark for children has fallen from 10 µg/dL to 3.5 µg/dL (Ruckart et al., 2021), and in 2021 WHO halved its annual PM2.5 guideline to 5 µg/m³ (World Health Organization, 2021).
For the current picture, see our explainer Why Are Children Hit Harder by Pollution? The Evidence Since 2005.