Good afternoon. My name is Kathleen Cooper and I'm senior researcher with the Canadian Environmental Law Association. I'm also chair of the coordinating committee and the policy committee of the Canadian Partnership for Children's Health and Environment, which is a partnership of public health, environmental, and child-focused organizations established to address the special vulnerability of children to toxic substances. You can see the member organizations of the partnership on the back of the brochure I distributed.
I'm going to run through some overheads drawn from the document called Child Health and The Environment—A Primer. I've provided some copies of it today, and if there aren't enough I can provide more. This document is intended to help the media, the public, service providers, and policy-makers such as you in your understanding of what is a very large and complex topic. It's further summarized in the brochure, which is focused on what parents can do to avoid key exposure risks.
We've prepared these materials for several reasons. First, among the groups and the partnership we needed to improve our understanding of a very large field to decide which concerns are greatest and where we should focus our attention. Second, we saw a need to raise public awareness about what can often be hidden exposures to toxic substances. Third, we saw a corresponding need for greater public awareness to enable public participation in discussions like these today about policy changes that are necessary to address these risks.
Our partnership is in year two of a multi-year campaign to raise this awareness, with 10,000 copies of the primer in print and over 200,000 brochures distributed across Canada. These bilingual resources are also available online. We expect their popularity will continue as awareness about these issues continues to increase.
I will discuss some key points about our findings and our work and conclude with some policy recommendations from the partnership, adding more detail from the perspective of further work within my own organization. I thank the technicians once again for letting me set this up on very short notice.
One of the key concepts about risks to children is their greater vulnerability, especially in the womb. This is a notion of windows of vulnerability. You'll be familiar with the old saying that the dose makes the poison. While this is often true, children's environmental health adds the element of timing. For example, an exposure to organic solvents, lead, or mercury that would not harm an adult can create very serious consequences during sensitive stages of fetal development. Throughout pregnancy, all the major systems of the body are developing. The placenta does not block the entry of most toxic substances. The fetus will share the mother's body burden of chemicals. Many of the organs and systems of the body are still immature at birth and continue to develop during infancy.
In fact, development in some systems continues for many years. The lungs and brain continue to develop until the end of adolescence. The years just before and during puberty are times of vulnerability in the reproductive system. Evidence points to chemical exposures both in the womb and during early puberty that may contribute to breast cancer later in life. As this illustration shows, it is important to remember that at all times across the human population a window of vulnerability is always open.
As I mentioned, one purpose of our research over the last six years was to write educational materials from a better understanding of this very large topic. The scale and seriousness of this topic can be alarming and we don't want to unnecessarily scare people. We ask ourselves which health impacts and which exposures matter the most, what can individuals do in response, and what are the necessary policy responses?
One way to set these priorities is to focus on health impacts where large numbers of children are affected. This overhead summarizes the health concerns and body systems or developmental processes of concern. You will already be aware of the concerns of asthma and other respiratory impacts. 12% of children in Canada have physician-diagnosed asthma. That's a fourfold increase from the early 1980s. Links to air pollution as a contributing factor are well established.
Impacts on brain development are of particular concern. We know that about 25% of Canadian children have one or more learning or behavioural problems. More research is needed to know whether or how much environmental contaminants contribute to these large numbers. We do know that children are routinely exposed to low levels of chemicals that are suspected of being toxic to the developing brain. We have to ask ourselves, what kinds of chances are we taking here?
Cancer is another area of significant concern. Fortunately, cancer in children is very rare, but it is the leading cause of illness-related death in children over the age of one. However, in young adults in Canada--that's age 20 to 44--several cancers are rising rapidly, often at sites in the endocrine system. And of course we continue to experience an epidemic of breast cancer, also an endocrine site. The sensitivity of early life stages to chemical exposures are probably involved in the onset of these cancers in young adults.
Reproductive and developmental impacts are associated directly with some contaminants or may be mediated through impacts on the endocrine system. There are concerns about impacts on the immune system. And finally, there are contaminants of concern associated with multiple health effects, such as lead, mercury, phthalates, PBDEs, some pesticides, etc. Those are the ones of greatest concern and needing our most urgent attention. It's important to recognize that for any of these health end points or for good health in general, many factors are at work, often described as the determinants of health. Environmental factors are one of the determinants of health.
Our knowledge is strongest for respiratory impacts. For the other health effects, clear associations can be drawn for only a small number of substances. However, we know hundreds, in fact thousands, of contaminants are suspected in some or several of the health impacts of concern in children, but we don't have complete information. What we do know, and continue to find out, is deeply troubling.
So which exposures matter most? That's another question we had for ourselves. This illustration shows the many ways that the fetus and child are exposed to environmental contaminants. Another aspect of the greater vulnerability of children is that we know they are more highly exposed than adults. For the health impacts of concern for children, we concluded that exposures of most concern are in both outdoor and indoor air, in food, and in consumer products. There's a lot of overlap in consumer products, because exposures in indoor air and in food can often originate from chemicals in consumer products. Indoor dust also appears to be a significant pathway, again often originating from toxic substances that are inadequately or completely unregulated in consumer products.
To illustrate some of these points, I want to talk about an example that you may be familiar with. This graph illustrates trend lines of chemicals in breast milk in Sweden since the 1970s. There are three points I'd like to make about this graph.
Sweden has conducted national bio-monitoring of breast milk since the 1970s--we should too--along with other bio-monitoring of chemicals in blood and urine. Statistics Canada plans to start a study in a few months. It should be an ongoing biannual review, not a single-year study, to be able to look at exactly these kinds of trend lines. The second thing you can see in this illustration is the impact of regulation. The levels of PCBs and the metabolite of DDT dropped in the 1970s following the decision to discontinue and ban their use. And you can see the trend line for PBDEs, the brominated flame retardants. Once use started to increase in the early 1980s, so did the contaminant levels in breast milk. These breast milk data informed the regulatory process. When they saw how fast these levels were rising, they swiftly banned two of the most widely used commercial mixtures of PBDEs, and following that ban, the breast milk levels began to drop. You can see the drop in the late 1990s. The final thing to notice in this graph is that 30 years later, even though levels continue to drop, DDT and PCBs are still contaminating breast milk. Like PBDEs, they are persistent as well as highly toxic, and that is why they had to be banned.
In Canada now, 10 years after Sweden took this regulatory action on PBDEs, we have PBDE levels in breast milk that are five to ten times higher than we're seeing in Sweden following this regulatory action. The Canadian state of the science report on PBDEs is now two years old and it's based on out-of-date science. The risk management strategy proposed under CEPA for these chemicals, and currently the subject of consultation, will have us talk about this problem in this country for another two years at least. Then we will consult further on passing regulations to ban PBDE mixtures that were already discontinued two years ago by major U.S.-based manufacturers. Right now, Sweden and other progressive European countries are seeking to ban the rest of the problem. They want to ban the deck of PBDEs that are still in production. But in Canada, in our risk management strategy we are not going to address what is essentially the remaining lion's share of the problem.
It's frustrating to read a document like this, because it simply enshrines the status quo. It sets a minimal or ineffective target that can easily be met already, and the rest of the problem remains unaddressed. In your actions to revise CEPA, you need to do something about this recurring problem with the way we regulate chemicals in Canada, and I can point to other examples in discussion.
I should close off with the policy recommendations, so what I've summarized on these slides are the recommendations that we agreed to within the partnership.
The first one has to do with the progressive reduction and elimination of child poverty. Again, this is about large numbers of children. One in five children in Canada lives in poverty, another one of the determinants of health. It's well established that poverty can contribute to significantly greater exposure to environmental contaminants, so the elimination of child poverty will improve their exposure situation.
The second and third recommendations have to do with calls for research. First, we need more research and related policy action to promote safer, non-toxic alternatives to toxic chemicals and pesticides. And it's important that you support other calls for significant increases in Canadian research and monitoring within--a couple of examples are noted here--bio-monitoring and a Canadian longitudinal study similar to the U.S. national children's study.
The final four recommendations have to do with changes in CEPA and associated policy for its implementation. These are general statements about increasing the focus on toxic and smog-forming air pollution and addressing the gap in the regulation of toxic substances and consumer products. We are also calling for mandatory, not discretionary evaluation of all potentially hazardous substances for their impacts on the developing brain.
All of these recommendations, and particularly the final one, I hope can be a part of further discussion with you today. Most of them are elaborated upon in detail in our submission to this committee from June 2006.
To conclude, I would like to point out that in Canada we have just been through--which I'm sure you are aware--a multi-year effort to revise the Pest Control Products Act. In your deliberations about CEPA, I urge you to incorporate into CEPA at least the same level of protection for children that we have now in Pest Control Products Act. That law now includes several specific requirements for considering children's health, and it also includes an important aspect of putting the precautionary principle into practice in that it specifically incorporates the principle of reverse onus: where a company seeks to register a pesticide, they must first demonstrate that their products will not cause harm prior to obtaining a registration to use a pesticide in Canada.
That's probably at least 10 minutes, and I should stop there. Thank you very much for your time.