In our study of children's environmental health, we were interested in the public perception of different risk issues pertaining to children. We looked at 17 different news dailies from all across Canada from 1985 until present. We actually did a bibliography searching for over 80 different risk issues and combined them with the key words: “children”, “environment”, and “health”. We were able to rank these 80 different risk issues from the highest number of articles and the highest frequency of these words appearing in the news media. These were newspaper articles that would raise awareness among the general public or point to issues the public may be worried about.
Of course, following on the heels of the Walkerton water tragedy, contamination of drinking water, bacteria and chemicals in water, was number one. Interestingly, numbers two through eight were all the various facets of chemical contamination: lead and lead poising, pesticides in food, and pollution as a general concept. But mostly they were chemicals, pesticides, and mercury in fish. Numbers nine and ten were smoking and tobacco smoke, which have strong chemical components.
We were also interested to see whether there was a linkage in the public's mind between the risk issues we had ranked and legislation or regulation. We added those words onto our search. Interestingly, we saw almost a complete drop-off. There are very few articles that mentioned children's environmental health, a risk issue, and legislation. This leads us to believe that in the public's mind, the news media provides them with a lot of information, but there's not this linkage between the need to do something with regulation and children's environmental health.
In our study, we also conducted a series of expert interviews. We looked at three jurisdictions: Canada, the United States, and member countries of the European Union. We conducted these open-ended interviews, which lasted up to an hour, where we asked them a series of questions to identify barriers, facilitators, and other approaches they use in their jurisdictions to protect children's environmental health.
Regardless of jurisdiction, the experts had common opinions. I'm going to read the top three to you. All of the experts agreed that there were huge areas of uncertainty, and there was simply no information for many chemicals and many chemical environment hazards in relation to children's environmental health.
Secondly, the experts pointed to a lack of research funding, a lack of political will to invest moneys into research, bio-monitoring , database management, and program building. In all the jurisdictions we looked at, experts believed that in order to quantify the scope of the problem and to better understand environmental health outcomes linked to the exposure levels of different chemicals, bio-monitoring is needed. There needs to be a mechanism for sharing this information among different jurisdictions in the country.
The one closed question we did ask in our survey was, does legislation adequately protect children in your jurisdiction? Regardless of whether they were in Canada, the United States, or the EU, about 50% of the respondents indicated that, no, legislation does not protect children's environmental health, and a better job could be done.