Environmental pollutants and disease in American children: estimates of morbidity, mortality, and costs for lead poisoning, asthma, cancer, and developmental disabilities.
By Philip J. Landrigan, C. Schechter, J. M. Lipton, Marianne C. Fahs, Jasmine Schwartz. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2002
594 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In this study, we aimed to estimate the contribution of environmental pollutants to the incidence, prevalence, mortality, and costs of pediatric disease in American children. We examined four categories of illness: lead poisoning, asthma, cancer, and neurobehavioral disorders. To estimate the proportion of each attributable to toxins in the environment, we used an environmentally attributable fraction (EAF) model. EAFs for lead poisoning, asthma, and cancer were developed by panels of experts through a Delphi process, whereas that for neurobehavioral disorders was based on data from the National Academy of Sciences. We define environmental pollutants as toxic chemicals of human origin in air, food, water, and communities. To develop estimates of costs, we relied on data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Health Care Financing Agency, and the Practice Management Information Corporation. EAFs were judged to be 100% for lead poisoning, 30% for asthma (range, 10-35%), 5% for cancer (range, 2-10%), and 10% for neurobehavioral disorders (range, 5-20%). Total annual costs are estimated to be $54.9 billion (range $48.8-64.8 billion): $43.4 billion for lead poisoning, $2.0 billion for asthma, $0.3 billion for childhood cancer, and $9.2 billion for neurobehavioral disorders. This sum amounts to 2.8 percent of total U.S. health care costs. This estimate is likely low because it considers only four categories of illness, incorporates conservative assumptions, ignores costs of pain and suffering, and does not include late complications for which etiologic associations are poorly quantified. The costs of pediatric environmental disease are high, in contrast with the limited resources directed to research, tracking, and prevention.
Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/36a142c3341a9ecc734b85cd888b88f5d4af12ab
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Citations in the corpus
- Prevalence of exposure of heavy metals and their impact on health consequences (2018, background): “Studies have investigated that amount of Pb which is used in present decade exceeds the amount of Pb that has been used in all previous decades.152 Twomain routes of Pb exposure include ingestion of food and water contaminated with Pb and inhalation of aerosols or particles of dust which are contami”
- Toxic Heavy Metal and Metalloid Accumulation in Crop Plants and Foods. (2016, unknown): “Enormous quantities are also present in the environment owing to the use of leaded gasoline for several decades (63).”
- Prevalence of Parent-Reported Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder Among Children in the US, 2007 (2009, methodology): “Finally, we compared the health care experiences of children who currently had ASD to the experiences of those who once had the diagnosis and those who never had an ASD diagnosis by using the 5 components used to measure the American Academy of Pediatrics medical home framework23: (1) whether the ch”
- Is It a Crime to Produce Ecological Disorganization? Why Green Criminology and Political Economy Matter in the Analysis of Global Ecological Harms (2013, unknown): “4 billion (Landrigan et al. 2002).”
- Predictive Modeling for Public Health: Preventing Childhood Lead Poisoning (2015, background): “General Terms Machine Learning, Social Good, Lead Poisoning, Public Health, Public Policy”