Children’s environmental health units

Overview

Health care providers are well placed to detect, treat, and prevent environmentally-related diseases and health conditions. Few mechanisms and structures are in place to enhance the recognition of environmental influences on human health, serve as repositories and sources of information for those concerned about children’s health and the environment, and promote action towards healthier and safer environments for children of today and adults of the future. For health professionals to effectively protect children from environmental threats, specialized training is useful.

Evidence shows that health providers are generally not provided the training that they need to address the complex environmental health issues with respect to air, water, soil, and products (Pope & Rall, 1995) Diarrhoeal diseases often recur frequently when underlying causes such as contaminated water are not taken into account by the health provider, understood by the community or adequately addressed by governments.

The complexity of children’s environmental health (CEH) issues is compounded by the combination of legacy environmental issues, such as water quality and sanitation service delivery, with modern challenges such as transboundary contamination by persistent toxic substances, ozone depletion and hence ultraviolet and ionising radiation, global climate change, and exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals). For children in developing countries, the presence of all such risks represent a ‘triple burden of disease’ – a high level of communicable diseases, the increasingly severe burden of non-communicable diseases, and emerging risks from new diseases and additional stressors from the social and physical environment.