ABSTRACT
This month the children’s environmental health (CEH) movement reaches the age of 21 years, an important milestone. The movement began in California in October 1989 with the launch of The Kids in the Environment Project, designed to train health professionals about environmental health and children. This project subsequently evolved into the Children’s Environmental Health Network (https://www.cehn.org/), a national organization headquartered in Washington, DC. Pediatricians’ interest in children’s unique susceptibility to environmental hazards probably dates further back, at least to 1954, when fallout from a nuclear weapons test on Bikini Island in the South Pacific caused acute radiation burns among people living on neighboring islands. Two boys exposed to fallout when they were infants developed severe hypothyroidism and short stature in mid-childhood. Young children were more severely affected than adults; among 35 children < 15 years of age, 3 developed carcinoma of the thyroid, compared with 2 among 46 persons who were ≥ 15 years of age at exposure (Merke and Miller 1992). These cases highlighted children’s
special vulnerability to ionizing radiation. Because of concerns about fallout from weapons testing and fears of nuclear war, in 1957 the American Academy of Pediatrics established what is now known as the Committee on Environmental Health to address these issues. For 53 years this committee has been the world leader in advocacy and education about risks to children from environmental hazards, publishing the first book on pediatric environmental health in 1999 (Etzel 1999).
