ASIA: Unhealthy Environments Harm Children the Most

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Mar 6 2002 (IPS) - At least once a week, Supaporn Boonmag spends her afternoons studying the quality of water in the river that flows by her school in Pathumthani, a province north of Bangkok.

Likewise, her classmates among the school’s 2,500 students pursue other activities aimed at generating a clean and healthy environment. They include waste management, where students help sort out rubbish, and creating organic fertiliser for use in the Kanaratbumroong Pathumthani secondary school.

“We have to do our share to make this environment healthy,” says 16-year-old Supaporn, who is studying science and math. “If we have an idea, we discuss it and then see how to include it in the school’s health promoting programme.”

Supaporn says that the school’s programme is helping to create a conducive atmosphere to study and grow up in. “It is important for us to have such an environment. This place is good,” explains Sikarin Jansingto, 16, who is studying French and English.

But not all children across Asia enjoy spending days in such a health conscious environment, a reality that worries the region’s public health experts. Equally troubling for them is the impact that hazardous environments are having on the region’s youngest citizens, children under age five.

Asian children, in fact, make up a sizeable number of those who die annually due to environmental hazards worldwide. Some of the leading hazards such as inadequate drinking water and sanitation, indoor air pollution, injuries and poisoning kill some three million children under five every year, states the World Health Organisation (WHO).

This trend is the subject of a five-day international conference ongoing at a research institute outside Bangkok. The WHO meeting seeks to share available research on the environmental hazards most injurious to child’s health and to identify appropriate remedies to help the vulnerable children.

The conference on ‘Environmental Threats to the Health of Children’ is the first major initiative of the Geneva-based health body’s newly created Task Force for the Protection of Children’s Environmental Health.

“The lost or compromised ability to be active which children suffer from environment degradation is vast,” states a WHO press statement. “Yet, until recently, no specific efforts had been made to address the environment hazards which specifically affect children.”

“New research is proving that children exposed to environmental hazards are more vulnerable than we thought before,” says Dr Jenny Pronczuk, leader of the WHO’s task force on children’s environmental health. “Environmental health issues cannot be pushed back.”

Equally relevant, according to Dr William Suk, are the conclusions being reached by researchers that the hazards impacting children vary from country to country and also from community to community within countries.

“The environmental hazards in Asian countries vary from Japan, Thailand to China,” adds Suk, a director at the U.S. government’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. “Public health officials are consequently compelled to design specific preventive programmes.”

This is borne out by WHO researchers, who say, for instance, that arsenic contamination of groundwater is a serious problem in Bangladesh, India and China. Bangladesh is home to some 35 to 77 million people out of the world’s 125 million people who are “at risk of drinking contaminated water”, states a WHO backgrounder.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) echoes this view. “We’re mainly concerned about the deteriorating quality of drinking water in some countries in the region – contaminated by both chemicals and bacteria,” says Dr Stephen Atwood, regional advisor for health and nutrition at UNICEF’s East Asia and Pacific office.

“Children in many Asian countries have significant exposure to various organic chemicals, including pesticides, solvents, polychlorinated biphenyls, doxins,” adds a paper co-authored by Suk, titled ‘Environment Threats to the Health of Children: The Asian Perspective’.

“In a study in Cambodia, 23 percent of children 6 to 12 years of age in the village of Siem Reap suffered from skin lesions secondary to pesticide exposure, where the exposure came from both the living and play areas and from child labour in the agricultural fields,” it notes.

The Philippines has hazardous levels of air pollution that endanger children’s health. “Air pollution is a major problem for the children of the Philippines, both indoor air pollution from tobacco smoke and outdoor pollution from traffic (close to 60 percent) and industry (40 percent),” it adds.

A Thai public health official adds that Bangkok’s air contains worrying amount of toxic chemicals. “It has the potential to cause cancer,” she says.

But Asia’s rural environment is far from safe either. In India, children in rural homes are exposed to contaminated air due to large use of bio mass fuels, says Dr Kalpana Balakrishnan, associate professor at Ramachandra Medical College in Chennai, India. “Households using bio mass fuel are upwards of 80 percent.”

Dr Pronczuk, the WHO official, says the current conference is an “important initiative” to shape public health policies to protect children from environmental hazards. “The WHO wants to get a sense of how acute this problem is globally. The solutions have to be science based.”

ASIA: Unhealthy Environments Harm Children the Most

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Mar 6 2002 (IPS) - At least once a week, Supaporn Boonmag spends her afternoons studying the quality of water in the river that flows by her school in Pathumthani, a province north of Bangkok.
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