Protecting Children from Environmental Toxins Toxicity testing of pesticides and industrial chemicals is a crucial step

0199 Epidemics of overt toxicity following widespread environmental contamination from commercial toxins heralded the discovery of children’s enhanced vulnerability to lead, methyl mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and tobacco [1,2,3,4,5] (Box 1). Over the past three decades, researchers have found that remarkably low-level exposures to these toxins are linked with less overt symptoms of toxicity— intellectual impairments, behavioral problems, spontaneous abortions, or preterm births [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14, 15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27, 28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40]. Moreover, there is emerging evidence that decrements in intellectual abilities and low birth weight linked with lead or tobacco are, for a given increment of exposure, greater at lower levels than those found at higher levels [10,41,42,43]. The consequences of exposure to many other chemicals or mixtures of chemicals, such as insecticides— chemicals oftentimes specifically designed to be toxic—are largely unknown [33,34,35,44]. Many of these chemicals or their metabolites are routinely found in the blood and body fluids of pregnant women and children [45].