According to a study in Epidemiology published in January of this year, the number of newly diagnosed cases of autism in California children rose over six-fold, from 205 new cases in 1990 to 3,000 in 2006.1 Food allergies among children
are becoming much more common and serious, as is asthma. Newly diagnosed eczema cases in the U.S. increased 6.7-fold from 1977 to 20062 and rose 42 percent from 2001 to 2005 in the U.K.3 One in four children is now overweight or obese, and the number of children and teenagers with diabetes is rising sharply.
What is driving these trends? Many scientists are beginning to suspect some causes are linked to what we eat and are exposed to very early in life through food, water and air—with pesticides posing more and more of a proven risk. In fact, the list of health problems for which pesticide exposure has emerged as a risk factor overlaps almost perfectly with the list of health problems that have risen most sharply in the last decade. Given our medical advances and record-high health care expenditures, coupled with decades of progress in cleaning up the air and water, why does it seem to be getting harder to raise a healthy kid in America? There are three plausible answers. First, maybe it really isn’t. Perhaps epidemiologists have gotten better at collecting health statistics, and in fact, kids today are no more or less healthy than those 20 years ago. A number of studies in the last few years have explored this possibility in trying to explain steeply rising rates of autism, asthma, eczema, and childhood allergies. Virtually all conclude that the increases are, for the most part, real.
Story by Dr. Charles Benbrook, www.organiccenter.org
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