Children's environmental health. Lessons from the past and prospects for the future.

Environmental pediatrics is an area of pediatric medicine that has come a long way in the past 50 years. It has risen to importance in parallel with two developments: (1) the conquest in the industrialized nations of the major infectious diseases and their replacement by chronic conditions, such as asthma, cancer, developmental disabilities, and birth defects as the primary causes of illness and death in children and (2) the growing recognition that chemicals in the environment are responsible, at least in part, for these changes in patterns of disease. The challenge now to environmental pediatrics is to better understand the impact of chemical substances on the patterns of health and disease in children and to design evidence-based approaches to the treatment and prevention of childhood disease of environmental origin.