Children’s Health Centers: Past, Present, and Future

A physician who conducted some of the first studies documenting the effect of lead poisoning on children. An epidemiologist studying the effects of exposure to diethyl-stilbestrol (DES). A toxicologist pointing out the many different chemical exposures associated with impulsivity. Though each of their disciplines uses a different language, all of these scientists study the links between the environment and childhood disease. They are just a few of the researchers who converged at the " Children's Environmental Health Research: Past, Present, and Future " conference held 22–23 January 2007 at the NIEHS. Sponsored in full by the NIEHS and planned jointly with the EPA, the conference aimed to get scientists talking about what types of research have been most effective. The result was recommendations to help chart the course for NIEHS children's environmental health research over the next five to ten years, including the future of the Centers for Children's Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research. Phil Landrigan, a pediatrician and chairman of community and preventive medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, who chaired the workshop, says the children's research centers have created a critical mass of researchers in pediatrics , epidemiology, toxicology , human development, and other disciplines pursuing children's health issues. " By virtue of having this critical mass, we were able in ten years to gain con-vergent toxicological and epidemiological i n f o r m a t i o n o n t h e developmental neurotoxi-city of the organophosphate pesticides, [a process] that took nearly one hundred years to accomplish in the case of lead, " he says. In 2000, on the basis of this emerging science, the EPA banned residential use of the pesticides chlorpyrifos and diazinon, and research in the children's centers has documented the success of community interventions to reduce children's pesticide exposures using integrated pest management. " Another great advantage of the centers, " says Landrigan, " is that they are superb interdisciplinary incubators of the next generation of research leaders in chil-dren's environmental health. " Specific goals of the workshop included discussing recommendations for advancing research to home in on the contributions of the environment to disease in children, to develop better exposure and effects monitoring , to develop new strategies for intervention in and prevention of chil-dren's diseases, and to translate research findings into clinical and public health practice. The meeting was organized into sessions focusing on four …