From US News and World Report Starting this week, pregnant women
in Duplin County, N.C., and Queens, N.Y., will be getting
letters and phone calls asking them to be part of the National
Children’s Study. This first-ever effort, 10 years in the
making, will follow thousands of children from the womb to age
20, with the goal of finding the causes of major health problems
like asthma, autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,
low birth weight, birth defects, and premature birth. In the
months and years to come, 103 more areas of the country will be
included in this first large-scale, long-term study to
investigate environmental factors like pollution and pesticides
as possible causes. “We’ll be able to amass information on the
environmental causes of these diseases within three to five
years,” says Philip Landrigan, a principal investigator for the
study, based at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
He pioneered research on the health effects of air pollution on
children, proving in the 1970s