4 Million Children Die Each Year from Enviro-Hazards

They always say you can tell everything about a society by how it treats its children:

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by Matthew Sparkes, London, UK on 08. 1.07

Environmental hazards are killing four million children every year. The World Health Organisation claims that problems such as polluted air and water are causing poisonings, acute respiratory infections, diarrhoea diseases and malaria due to thriving mosquito populations in dirty water.

Up to 30% of disease in children can be attributed to environmental factors. "This is something that intuitively we have always recognized, but we never put a number to it," said WHO expert, Jenny Pronczuk.

Children don't even have to come into contact with harmful chemicals during their life for them to have an impact on their health. Any exposure that the mother recieves whilst pregnant can also be passed on, and the effects of that exposure may only emerge in adolescence. Pronczuk said, "For example if you look at lead exposure, the effect will be different if the child was exposed in utero because the lead of the mother goes into the bones of the child."

The fact that this report talks about the effects on children obviously makes for a more emotionally affecting story, and the vastness of the number affected is hard to comprehend. It’s important though, that the WHO look into these issues, because we could be walking into huge medical problems in the future. Our generation may be the first in history that becomes less healthy than the previous. The negative effects of our environment have increased faster than medical science.