From: matus [matus@snet.net]
Sent: Friday, September 27, 2002 2:24 AM
To: matus@snet.net
Subject: MFD List - Kids are healthier now

Kids are healthier now
----------
HealthFactsAndFears.com
by Adam S. Valerio
   "Statistics on children's economic security, health, behavior,
   social environment, and education reveal some good news ... While
   the statistics tell a positive story, though, many groups prefer
   to instill fear." (08/07/02)

http://www.healthfactsandfears.com/featured_articles/aug2002/kids080702.html

Kids Are Healthier Now
August 7, 2002

By Adam S. Valerio

Is today's vast supply of health and parenting advice making a difference in
the well-being of American children?

Statistics on children's economic security, health, behavior, social
environment, and education reveal some good news, according to a report from
the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics: Kids in the
U.S. are growing up healthier. "The well-being of America's children is
probably better than it ever has been," says Dr. Duane Alexander of the
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

While the statistics tell a positive story, though, many groups prefer to
instill fear. Two examples:

-The Center for Children's Health and the Environment (CCHE), a department
of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine (though not representative of the
school itself), is one such agitator. In recent months, the CCHE ran several
full-page ads in the New York Times claiming, among other things, that we
are "seeing a disturbing rise in the reported incidence of cancer among
young children and adolescents, especially brain cancer, testicular cancer,
and acute lymphocytic leukemia." According to the Natural Resources Defense
Council, "The overall incidence of childhood cancer increased 10% between
1973 and 1994." The CCHE asserts that this increased incidence of cancer
cases can at least partially be attributed to the use of pesticides and
chemicals found in many products.

-Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), in a May 11, 2000 press
release, calls "for new policies and actions to solve the problem of
chemical contamination on our kids." Furthermore, they called on Congress to
require schools across the country to use fewer and less-toxic pesticides.
(It's surprising that they don't call for a complete ban on such chemicals,
given how deadly they imagine them to be.)

But there is little reason to fear the tiny chemical residues that bother
groups such as CCHE and PSR. Any toxicologist or pharmacist can tell you
that "it is the dose that makes the poison" - indeed, that could even be
called "the toxicologist's credo." Isn't there at least one toxicologist at
PSR? If there is, he or she should know that while some pesticides can cause
tumors in rats if given to them in extremely large doses, such chemicals
have never been causally linked to cancers in humans, children or not.

Moreover, the incidence of most childhood cancers has not gone up in recent
years. According to the National Cancer Institute, overall cancer incidence
among children and teens has actually gone down every year since 1991. The
most encouraging news is that the childhood mortality rate from cancer has
dropped from about 4.4 cases per 100,000 kids in 1980 to an impressively-low
2.7 cases per 100,000 kids in 1999, says the Forum on Child and Family
Statistics. Obviously, medical advances in treatment and detection have done
a lot for America's kids.

Another major victory for children's health is the significant decrease in
the infant mortality rate, which is down from over 11 deaths per thousand
babies in 1983, to 7.2 per thousand in 1998, and a rate of 7.0 per thousand
as of 1999. Dr. Alexander considers these statistics, reported by the Forum,
to be quite meaningful, and a cause for optimism. Experts ascribe the
improvement to a combination of public awareness (improved prenatal care)
and medical research.

There is at least one great cause for worry in the child health statistics,
though.

According to a recent World Health Organization study, "700 million children
breathe air polluted by tobacco smoke, particularly in their homes,
suffering long-term health damage from the secondary smoke." Even more
discouraging, WHO reports that the age at which people start smoking
"appears to be falling, possibly the result of increased promotion (of
cigarettes) aimed at children." Smoking already accounts for approximately
one in four American deaths, and with some 1.1 billion smokers around the
world, smoking deaths are sure to haunt the otherwise encouraging health
statistics of coming decades.

The Forum report indicates that American children may be bucking that global
trend. The percentage of American tenth graders that report having smoked in
the month prior to being surveyed has declined from 14% in the year 2000 to
a substantially-decreased, yet still disheartening, 12% in 2001. Percentages
for eighth graders, meanwhile, decreased from 7% to less than 6%. The Forum
report suggests progress is being made, disturbing though it may be to have
even a small fraction of the under-thirteen population smoking.

California is doing particularly well in the struggle against teen smoking.
The California Department of Health recently reported that a record low 5.9%
of kids twelve to seventeen years old claim to have smoked a cigarette in
the previous thirty days, a striking 93% decrease since 1994, when such
surveys were first conducted and 11% of kids said they had recently smoked.
The rapid decline in teen smoking in California has several probable causes,
including innovative anti-smoking campaigns portraying smoking as "uncool,"
removal of tobacco advertisements that appeal to younger people, higher
cigarette taxes, and, perhaps most important, lots of social pressure.
Unfortunately, statistics from the federal Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention suggest that the national smoking rate among high school students
is almost five times higher than California's - but the national rate, too,
is improving, says the CDC.

Here's hoping that the positive trends reported by the Forum and by the CDC
continue, and that people who are genuinely concerned about children's
health keep their eyes on real threats such as smoking, not the imagined
plagues wrought by pesticides and other environmental chemicals.

Adam Valerio is an intern at the American Council on Science and Health.

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