Children’s Vulnerability to Environmental Exposures: Early rapid development

Shidonna Raven
27 minutes ago
2 min read

Oct 14m 2010

Source: NIH

National Library of Medicine

National Center for Biotechnology Information

Photo Source: Unsplash

Table 2.

Examples of climate-sensitive exposures at all stages of development.

Preconception →	Embryo/fetus →	Newborn →	Juvenile →	Adolescence
Maternal nutritional status can affect lifetime risk of many chronic diseases (WHO 2002b).	Extreme heat during pregnancy is related to lower birth weight (Deschênes et al. 2009).	Breast-feeding practices are affected by extreme weather events (Akachi et al. 2009).	Diarrheal illness is already a leading cause of death in young children (Campbell-Lendrum and Woodruff 2006).	Particulate matter and ozone can affect lung development (Shea et al. 2007).

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Differences in physiology and baseline metabolism

Children have less effective heat adaptation capacity than do adults (Committee on Sports Medicine and Fitness 2000).

Early rapid development creates windows of vulnerability in utero (Selevan et al. 2005) and in early childhood

Exposures during these windows can cause devastating damage that has no counterpart in adult life (Berkman et al. 2002). When children contract Plasmodium falciparum malaria from mosquitoes, a vector exquisitely sensitive to changes in temperature and precipitation, they have a higher complication rate (severe anemia, cerebral malaria, and long-term neurologic sequelae) and a higher mortality rate relative to older populations, presumably because they have less acquired functional immune response (Patz and Reisen 2001; Snow et al. 1999). Similarly, prenatal or childhood exposure to specific toxins, toxicants, infectious agents, or conditions such as undernutrition can produce disease and dysfunction that lasts through childhood and in some cases first manifests only in adulthood (Crimmins and Finch 2006; Hales 1997; Victora et al. 2008).