Susceptibility of children to environmental toxic substances.

Our understanding of toxicity of environmental substances is based mainly on investigations using adult human populations and matured animals. Therefore, the scientific community and regulatory agencies have very little knowledge regarding how children respond to insult from toxic chemicals. However, certain scientific data indicate that children are more susceptible to toxic exposure than adults because they have proportionally more intake of food contaminants, active developmental processes, multiple exposure pathways and susceptible socio-behavioral activities. More emphasis should therefore be focused on addressing the information gap for improving the health of our children.