Foreword

Article Outline

• Copyright

This issue of the journal features 2 articles that describe potential environmental issues about which pediatricians should be aware: phthalates and children’s health, and environmental genotoxicants/carcinogens and childhood cancer: filling knowledge gaps.

The first article summarizes the data on phthalates. These chemicals have been in the news a lot in the past couple of years. You may have read in the newspaper several weeks ago that Ontario is now considering a ban on one of the phthalates, bisphenol A, which is a potentially harmful chemical found in common plastic baby products. The City of San Francisco has already banned the sale, distribution, and manufacture of baby products made with bisphenol A. Dr. Sathyanarayana’s article describes the scientific evidence regarding the effect of these chemicals on children’s health. The governmental actions being considered are examples of the Precautionary Principle in action. Briefly, the Precautionary Principle, which is of German origin, is a rough translation of a word that means “forecaring” (caring for a difficult future). Although it is widely applied by the European Union, it is not universally accepted in the United States. There are 4 major components of the principle: (a) preventive action should be taken when uncertainty about safety exists, (b) proponents of a proposed activity are responsible for documenting its safety, (c) all alternatives to a possibly harmful action should be explored, and (d) public participation in decision making should be increased.

The second article describes associations between environmental genotoxicants/carcinogens and childhood cancer. Although Dr. Anderson’s article was previously published in 2006 (Mutation Research 608:136-156) the editors chose to republish a truncated version of it here because we thought it deserved wider readership and merited republication in a pediatric journal. Her article points out that in studies of childhood cancer, more attention should be given to studying fathers and infants. She reminds us, for example, that in most studies of childhood cancer, maternal smoking does not appear to be a very important risk factor. Paternal smoking, on the other hand, has shown a significant association with risk of cancer in childhood. Dr. Anderson contends that infants should be the focus of more study because the newborn retains many of the special sensitivities of the fetus but has lost the protective physical and metabolic shields of the mother and the placenta. When fathers and infants are more thoroughly studied, we may achieve a better understanding of how environmental genotoxicants and carcinogens are linked to childhood cancer.