The NRC report has had a substantial impact on policy, perhaps greater than its findings support. In October 1995, EPA Administrator Carol Browner announced EPA's new national children's health policy to ensure that the agency's risk assessments and public health standards take into account environmental threats to children and infants. Where data on children are not available or are uncertain, EPA may apply an added 10-fold safety factor to a pesticide tolerance to protect children. The FPQA also requires EPA to consider the cumulative risk posed by exposure to all pesticides of similar classes. Many of the concerns expressed about children's health are legitimate.
Children are physiologically different from adults and face different health risks.
What is troubling about the agenda some have put forward, however, is that environmental health risks have not been established as one of the top threats to children's health. Environmental and children's health advocates point to downward trends in several indicators of children's health to make the case that children are endangered by environmental contaminants. Some attribute the increased incidence of certain types of childhood cancer, birth defects, and asthma to environmental factors. At EPA's September 1997 conference, Browner said that although the death rate from childhood cancer has declined, the incidence of cancer in children has increased. These statistics are very misleading, however.