Don't Drink the Water
Environmental Polutants and America's Children

A New World and Its Perils

Progress in public health has dramatically improved the lives of American children in recent years. Better sanitation, improved nutrition, widespread immunizations, and antibiotics have prevented countless deaths in infants and children. Despite these improvements, however, children face an ever-growing threat from the one thing they cannot escape: their environment. Children have little choice when it comes to the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the food they eat. In the last fifteen years alone, the incidence of illnesses and disabilities associated with environmental pollutants has increased dramatically. During this time period, the number of children with cancer has risen steadily, childhood asthma cases have more than doubled, and neonatal heart defects have nearly tripled. New research suggests that children are much more susceptible to the damaging effects of environmental pollutants than was previously thought. We’ve always known that lead, for example, is an environmental toxin that has the potential to severely damage a young child’s developing nervous system. Over the last twenty years, however, researchers have reduced by half the threshold that marks a dangerous blood-level of lead.

Unfortunately, all the new research on harmful environmental agents has failed to inspire either industry or the government to implement safeguards that could protect children from the growing danger of their environment. Even well-documented hazards to children’s health such as mercury in fish have proven difficult to address. When consumed by a pregnant woman, mercury can cause neurological damage to the developing fetus. Fish start accumulating mercury if they happen to live near coal-fired power plants, demonstrating the impact that seemingly unrelated fields like energy policy can have on public health.

The regulatory history of restricting mercury levels in fish offers some sobering lessons about how environmental policy functions (or malfunctions) in the United States. In 1997 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set a mercury limit in fish that was four times as strict as the one set by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The EPA, however, could only inform consumers of the dangers of eating mercury-contaminated fish, lacking the ability to regulate the fish entering the food supply. When the FDA revised its mercury advisory in 2001, it advised women of childbearing age to limit intake of only four high-mercury fish species, conspicuously omitting a warning against tuna fish. These limits were surprising because the data used by the FDA showed that the four restricted species accounted for less than 10% of Americans’ cumulative mercury ingestion from fish. Tuna accounted for a full 34%. Why was the most dangerous fish omitted from the FDA’s warnings? The Wall Street Journal pointed out that “[f]ood companies have long lobbied to mitigate any FDA action on canned tuna, one of the top grossing supermarket items in revenue per unit of shelf space.” In 2003 the FDA again revised its guidelines for mercury in fish, with an eye to keeping “the market share [of tuna fish] at a reasonable level,” as Clark Carrington, an FDA administrator, explained. The failure of the FDA to base its guidelines on the mounting scientific evidence puts pregnant women and their unborn children at considerable risk.