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 that children could suffer IQ loss and other serious damage from exposure to low levels of lead previously thought safe