UPDATE no. 57   Dear member of INCHES, In this update:   News Young people’s voices News from India Short messages Articles Pollution in Peru Conferences Reports Interesting website   News It’s our world, our future too: Young people’s voices on Environment and Health priorities  . This seven-minute video contains the voices of young people from Russia, UK and Belgium - and explains why listening to them is important. The children and students describe how the environment is affecting their health, and what they think can be done for a better future. Three themes are highlighted: urban environment and mental health; water, chemicals and air quality; and, other issues, such as racism, drugs and violence. The film ends with European commissioner Margot Wallström saying why the needs of children have always been her priority as a politician. The full DVD version of the video is available free of charge by e-mailing your request and full contact details to Monica Guarinoni, EEN secretariat Tel: +32 2 233 3875   News from India Linking child health to environment The  Indian  Academy  of Paediatricians (IAP) is drawing attention towards child health through a green campaign. They  have  named  their  campaign,  `Environment and Child Health Group.'  Paediatricians  have  raised the issue of air pollution, a major cause for many respiratory diseases.                                                 Children  are more susceptible to the ill-effects of air pollution because their  immune  systems  and  organs are immature, according to T.M. Ananda Kesavan, Department of Paediatrics, Government Medical College, Thrissur.  Lungs  are not well-formed at birth and it takes about six years for it to fully develop. Man-made  changes  in the environment and day-to-day life have an indirect effect on the cause of diseases, says Dr. Ananda Kesavan.                  Paediatricians  say  that one per cent  increase in children's risk of mortality is owing to respiratory problems, mainly caused by pollutants. Paediatrician S. Sachidananda  Kamath  says  that studies in Europe have reported  that  acute  respiratory infections  in children living in most polluted areas is 50 per cent higher than those in least polluted areas.   Pollutants  in the air affect not only children, but also adults. Pregnant women  exposed  to high levels of carbon monoxide are at an increased risk of having low birth-weight babies. Studies using newborn rats have shown that exposure to carbon  monoxide can cause changes in the heart muscle tissue and other physiological and anatomical changes.                       Short messages High DDT levels found in breastmilk of Hong Kong mothers. High levels of DDT were found in the breastmilk of new mothers in Hong Kong even though the pesticide has long been banned in many places, including Hong Kong and China, suggesting that DDT is still being illegally used. News clip from Reuters July 2005. Health alert as Iranian capital chokes in smog. Schools in the Iranian capital were shut down and the sick or elderly told to lock themselves indoors Tuesday as the city continued to choke on a thick blanket of  yellow-brown smog. Agence France-Presse. 6 December 2005.         Iran closes schools, kindergartens in Tehran because of high pollution. The government closed all schools and kindergartens in Iran's capital  city for two days beginning Tuesday because air pollution had reached dangerous levels. Associated Press. 6 December 2005.      New Canadian research shows that household dust is the principal source of exposure to flame retardants, a class of chemicals that has sparked a heated debate among scientists, some of whom believe regular exposure may lead to serious learning and developmental problems. Toddlers in particular are ingesting significant amounts of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), according to a study to be published in a forthcoming edition of the journal Environmental Science and Technology.    Scientists reported that perchlorate, a toxic component of rocket fuel, was contaminating virtually all samples of women's breast milk and its levels were found to be, on average, five times greater than in cow's milk. The contaminant, which originates mostly at defense industry plants, previously had been detected in various food and water supplies around the country. But the study by Texas Tech University's Institute of Environmental and Human Health was the first to investigate breast milk. The findings concern health experts because infants and fetuses are the most vulnerable to the thyroid-impairing effects of the chemical. Breast milk from 36 women in 18 states, including California, was sampled, and all contained traces of perchlorate.   Articles US-Run Smelter in Peru Harming Children - Scientists Children in Peru's La Oroya mining town have harmful levels of toxic heavy metals such as lead and arsenic in their bodies, a study by US scientists showed, in the first independent health probe into toxic gases pumped out by the US-owned Doe Run metal refinery.      Scientists from St. Louis University said that, along with the high blood lead levels established by earlier studies, some children under six have dangerously high levels of arsenic and cadmium, substances linked to lung and skin diseases.                                        "Everyone in La Oroya is being poisoned by a cocktail of toxic metals such as lead, arsenic, cadmium and other heavy metals," said Fernando Serrano, head of the study group at St. Louis health faculty.            The study showed that 97 percent of children in La Oroya under six have harmful levels of lead in their blood.Around 18 percent of the children suffer from high arsenic levels in     their bodies, and nearly 1 percent have cadmium in their blood.          Doe Run Peru says it has spent $78 million on modernization and by 2006 will have invested $94 million in steps to meet government environmental regulations, cutting workers' blood lead levels by a third.                                                                   But a recent study by Doe Run and Peru's Health Ministry showed 99.9 percent of children up to age six in La Oroya have abnormally high blood lead levels. Children have been measured in both studies because they are considered most susceptible to heavy metal poisoning, scientists said.              Missouri-based Doe Run says it is doing all it can to modernize the aging, blackened smelter, built in 1922 without environmental safeguards. The company plans to build a $100 million sulfuric acid plant to capture all toxic gases by 2009.       Keep children away from chemicals-  Mercury harms developing brains, slows economy  By Dr. Leonardo Trasande and Dr. Philip Landrigan                                           Children are America's most precious resource. We pediatricians routinely advise parents to use car seats and helmets to protect their children from devastating injuries. We urge      pregnant women to abstain from smoking and drinking and to eat a balanced diet to ensure    proper nutrition for their babies. These preventive measures do not merely make good        medical sense, they make good financial sense, preventing unnecessary and costly health     care and preserving children's futures. When we recently learned a preventable form of      brain injury - environmental pollution - is harming hundreds of thousands of American       children each year, we decided it was time to speak on behalf of the children. This type of brain damage can reduce their lifetime earnings potential by billions of dollars annually. Chemicals that poison the developing brain - neurotoxicants - pose an insidious threat to   children's health. These include lead, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and certain         pesticides. In the months right before and after birth, when children are passing through   the most rapid phases of development, they are especially vulnerable to these threats.      Neurotoxicants that gain entry to a pregnant woman's body can cross the placenta from       mother to child, enter the baby's brain and damage it permanently. The consequences are     loss of intelligence (as measured by IQ), behavior disruption, increased risk of attention  deficit disorder and heightened risk of autism. Many of these effects can last a lifetime.  The authors continu: Moms' fish intake is actor.                                                               Large-scale, prospective epidemiologic studies - one in the Seychelles Islands in the       Indian Ocean, another in New Zealand and a third in the Faroe Islands have found that       methyl mercury is among the most potent neurotoxicants. Children are exposed when their     mothers eat mercury-contaminated fish during or before pregnancy. In 2002, the National     Academy of Sciences found strong evidence for the toxicity of methyl mercury to children's  developing brains, even at low levels of exposure. Moreover, a recent study from the        Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found as many as 630,000 American children are born each year with mercury levels greater than 5.8 micrograms per liter - a level high     enough to damage the brain and decrease a child's IQ.                                       As pediatricians, we worry about the potential damage to each affected child. But beyond    the harm to thousands of individual children lie enormous socioeconomic consequences. Our study - "Public Health and Economic Consequences of Methylmercury Toxicity to the       Developing Brain," published in April in Environmental Health Perspectives, a peer-reviewed National Institutes of Health journal - found the reduction of children's IQ because of mercury pollution costs the United States an estimated $8.7 billion in lost earnings annually . Not all of this damage can be prevented, but some of it can. For example, some $1.3 billion of the economic loss is caused by mercury emitted by coal-fired power plants.  The Environmental Protection Agency has identified coal-fired power plants as the largest   industrial emitters of mercury, producing more than one third of all mercury pollution in   the U.S. In 2001, these plants released 91,000 tons of mercury in our nation's air. There   are well-defined technologies for reducing these emissions - such as flue gas filters- and many power plants have successfully used these technologies for many years.                 Although this threat and its remedy are both well understood, the Environmental Protection  Agency's Mercury Utility Rule would drastically delay significant reductions of mercury    emissions from power plants. By relaxing controls on power plant emissions, the Mercury     Utility Rule will permit 26 tons of mercury to be released each year into the atmosphere    through 2010.                                                                               Provisions under the Clean Air Act would require plants to reduce emissions below 5 tons    per year by 2008. These uncontrolled emissions will contaminate rivers, lakes and oceans -  keeping fish mercury levels high and leaving children vulnerable.                           The technical analyses used to promote these proposals failed to consider the impact of     mercury on children's health and its economic consequences. They focused almost exclusively on the costs of controlling pollution. Yet Congress and the White House are pushing to make the mercury rule the law.                                                                   Pediatricians routinely urge preventive action to protect children's health. Now we are     urging prevention on the part of the government. For the sake of our children and their     future, Congress and EPA must take action now to stop mercury pollution.                                                      Conferences: Workshop on children's environment and health  The European Public Health Alliance (EPHA) organised an international conference called “The right start in life for children and young people in Europe” (http://children.epha.org/) on the 9-10 November. The first day was dedicated to plenary sessions, and the second day (10th November) for workshops. EEN coordinated one of the workshops on “Children’s environment and health”, which focused on young people’s view and recommendations concerning chemicals.   A major international conference on the the health and well-being of children and.young people in Europe was held in Brussels 9-10 November 2005. The event brought together 200 local and regional authorities, practitioners, NGOs and policy-makers from across Europe and looked into key EU initiatives such as a Communication on implementation of children's rights, the YOUTH PACT, a Communication on the health of young people and other EU activities that impact on children The aim of the conference was to explore if children and young people are adequately supported and protected within the EU framework and to share examples of good practice in working with and empowering young people.   The Government of Argentina, the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization, and the Argentine Pediatric Society held an international conference on children's environmental health, Healthy Environments Healthy Children: Increasing Knowledge and Taking Action, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 14-16 November, 2005. Immediately following this conference there was a workshop sponsored by the World Health Organization and the International Programme on Chemical Safety, called Advances in the Use of Biomarkers in Children, 17-18 November.   New conferences Vulnerability of the Fetus and Infant to Ambient Pollutants and Reduced Food Intake in Pregnancy - Krakow, Poland,June 2.3, 2006   The purpose of the Conference is to assess the weight of evidence and assemble new achievements on the effects of prenatal and early postnatal exposure to ambient and indoor pollutants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, particulate matter, and environmental tobacco smoke on fetal/child growth, neurobehavioral development, and childhood health status. Another purpose of this Conference is also to assess fetal responses to the changes in intrauterine environment caused by reduced food intake around the time of conception and during pregnancy.   Reports Unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation  kill 4,000 children every day, global health experts said on Friday. They described the deaths as a "silent humanitarian crisis" and called for  immediate action. "There should be an outcry, from the health community above all, for        immediate, concerted efforts to confront the reality that sanitation coverage rates in the developing world barely keep pace with population growth," said Dr Jamie Bartram, of the World Health Organization (WHO).  Four out of 10 people around the globe do not have access to a simple pit  latrine and one-fifth have no source of safe drinking water.                "Far more people endure the largely preventable effects of poor sanitation and water supply than are affected by war, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction," Bartram said in an article in The Lancet medical journal. The report was published as part of a review of the Millennium Development Goals, a number of pledges set out in 1990 to improve living conditions in developing nations by 2015.                                                  Interesting website Please forward your website to share with our network members.   Take a look at: http://www.checnet.org/ http://www.who.int/ceh/en/ http://reports.eea.eu.int/environmental_issue_report_2002_29/en