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Children's Environmental Health
Introduction
Welcome to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) Sustainable Development and Environment Area (SDE)
web site on Healthy Environments for Children. In this site you will find documents developed within the region
on environmental concerns that focus explicitly on children. You will also find materials to download and use
in your community on children's environmental health and you will be able to link to other valuable sites that
provide information, documents and materials to download. It is our intention to provide you with the best
possible access to information that we think is useful to people in the region of the Americas. Please submit
comments or questions to webmaster khoddami@paho.org
Why do we Focus on Children?
Children are in more danger than adults from environmental hazards. On one hand, they can become exposed
to environmental threats more easily than adults. On the other hand, their developing bodies may allow the
exposures to take more of a toll on their health than adults. Distinctive behaviors and development stages
find children putting hands and objects in their mouths, rolling and crawling on the ground and floor, climbing
to dangerous places, discovering their surroundings and trying out new skills. While normal, these characteristics
often place children in risky situations if they live, play, learn or work in a degraded, contaminated or unsafe
environment. Poor children suffer the most. They tend to live in less safe and more polluted and degraded
environments while they suffer poor nutrition and run-down systems that are unable to fight against disease
and infection. Poor children also often enter the workforce at a young age to help support themselves or their families.
PAHO Strives to Improve Healthy Environments for Children
From its inception, the Pan American Health Organization has been working on environmental health. We were a
natural partner on children's environmental health and were therefore called to action by
the 1997 Declaration
of the Environment Leaders of the Eight on Children's Environmental Health.
Since then, we have launched studies, projects, initiatives and a regional program, called
Healthy
Environments: Healthy Children
.
We have worked with member countries to do this, often obtaining valuable support from the United States
and Canada to have the necessary funding and technical support to develop this central initiative in our organization.
Our work to improve healthy environments for children draws on several existing programs within the
organization, such as the Integrated
Management of Childhood Illness ,
Child and Adolescent Health ,
Health Promoting Schools Initiative ,
and Healthy Cities initiatives.
We are working to engage at local, national and regional levels, inciting movement throughout the hemisphere to
improve the environments in which children live, grow, learn, play and work.
We have developed tools to share with our member states
that may also prove useful to communities, academia, individuals, industry, and non-governmental organizations, both
within our region and throughout the world. These are listed below, also offering links to the documents. All of these
materials are available for use in the public domain, not for profit and require appropriate attribution. The suggested
citations are provided in each document.
Background material on children's environmental health in the Region.
Country profiles of children's environmental health.
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