Children's health and the environment--the first Herbert L. Needleman Award Lecture.

Children today are exposed extensively to toxins in the environment. Prominent among these are exposures to over 70,000 synthetic chemicals, all newly developed in the past 50 years and largely untested for their hazards to children's health. Children are uniquely vulnerable to toxins, and with increasing incidence they are developing chronic, disabling, life-threatening diseases known or suspected to be of environmental origin-asthma, endocrine disruption, cancer, and the diseases caused by tobacco. Pediatricians need to consider toxic etiologies in the differential diagnosis of childhood illness.