ARGENTINA: Getting the Big Picture on Children’s Environmental Health

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jul 19 2005 (IPS) - One third of all diseases that affect children under five years of age are caused by environmental factors, according to the World Health Organisation, which is why government authorities and civil society groups have joined together to study the true impact of the environment on children’s health in Argentina.

The Argentine Association of Doctors for the Environment (AAMMA) and the Canadian Institute of Child Health (CICH), in cooperation with the Argentine Ministry of Health and Environment, Health Canada, the University of Ottawa and the Argentine Society of Paediatrics (SAP), have joined forces to complete a profile of the state of children’s environmental health in Argentina.

Funding for the project has been provided by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

The underlying goal is to identify the environmental hazards to which the country’s children are exposed, so as to work towards decreasing these risks and the health problems they provoke.

“Treating the symptoms of diarrhoea or an asthma attack is very simple, but very little is done to look into the causes of these diseases, and these causes are often related to environmental factors,” Lilian Corra, a paediatrician and president of the AAMMA, told IPS.

Environmental factors directly cause a wide range of illnesses, including diarrhoea or intestinal parasites contracted from contaminated water, allergies and asthma triggered by air pollution, diseases spread by mosquitoes (which are becoming more prevalent as global temperatures rise), neurological disorders caused by exposure to heavy metals, and various forms of cancer.

A study by the World Health Organisation (WHO) indicates that 33 percent of diseases affecting children under the age of five are the result of environmental risk factors, which are nonetheless rarely addressed by doctors or parents when medical care is sought to treat the illness.

The idea of compiling children’s environmental health profiles like the one underway in Argentina is also being studied by paediatric associations in Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. “Argentina is working with tremendous commitment to this issue and would like to see the same project carried out in the entire Southern Cone subregion,” remarked Dr. Corra.

The project consists of three parts. The first involves a survey distributed to over 13,000 Argentine paediatricians who are members of the SAP, to be completed and submitted this month.

The survey is aimed at determining how much information paediatricians have on children’s environmental health issues, Dr. Corra explained.

One of the questions is whether environmental factors that can impact on the development of certain illnesses commonly found in children, such as respiratory ailments like bronchitis and asthma, are included in medical records.

The survey also asks if the children’s parents express concern or doubts to their doctors regarding the quality of water they consume, the possible toxicity of foods, or the risks of exposure to pesticides or sunburns.

It additionally asks the doctors themselves to identify the symptoms they believe to be associated with environmental factors.

The survey includes a list of environment-related health problems, such as respiratory ailments, premature birth, impaired intellectual development, neurological disorders related to lead or mercury poisoning, skin rashes and lesions, cancer, poisoning, hormonal imbalances and birth defects.

Another component of the project is the completion of two field case studies, addressing the particular environmental health issues faced in different environments, namely rural and urban.

The first has been underway since April in the northeastern province of Misiones, to analyse the effects on children of exposure to agricultural pesticides.

The second is being carried out in the municipality of Zarate in the eastern province of Buenos Aires, where authorities are concerned about the impact on children of exposure to lead, used in industries on the city’s outskirts.

Dr. Corra noted that it is easy for paediatricians to recognise the symptoms of acute lead poisoning, but not in cases of ongoing, low-level exposure, when symptoms are less obvious but the effects can be equally damaging and irreversible in the long term.

Mercury and lead have been dubbed “intellectual robbers” by the WHO, she noted, because they affect brain development, impairing functions like memory and the ability to concentrate and thereby stunting children’s intellectual capacity and learning abilities.

Dr. Corra also referred to the health risks posed by so-called persistent organic pollutants (POPs) which have been shown to weaken the immune system and increase the risk of cancer, hormonal imbalances and neurological disorders.

The Stockholm Convention, signed in 2001, is aimed at eliminating or reducing levels of 12 specific POPs, considered the most harmful, but several of them continue to be used or produced in Argentina.

The third and final component of the project involves the compilation of information on children’s environmental health through a review of Argentine and international publications, in order to make it available to the country’s paediatricians.

The project’s coordinators believe that by 2007 they will have a full picture of the state of children’s environmental health in Argentina, to help orient the measures to be adopted to reduce the risks of illness caused by environmental hazards.

Along the way, working groups and networks will be formed, creating greater awareness of the links between illness and the environment among health care authorities, paediatricians and the general public.

The Argentine Society of Paediatrics has already established a unit of environmental health experts, while the Ministry of Health and Environment has pledged to create environmental health paediatric units to work in hospitals and other health care centres, for which doctors are now being trained in a number of different provinces.

The units, similar to those already operating in Canada, the United States and Mexico, will function as part of a network in order to exchange information and propose concrete measures for specific threats.

“We need professional training that gives us a less fragmented, more holistic vision of health problems,” stressed Dr. Corra.

Almost all diseases have multiple causes, she said, which makes it necessary to weigh the impact of each on the development of a particular illness. “In order to do this, we have to change our system of education and training, and raise awareness of the relationship among these different factors,” she concluded.