Children’s Environmental Health Units

The World Health Organization has released its latest publication on Children’s Environmental Health Units.

www.who.int/entity/ceh/publications/childrensunit.pdf


Health care providers are well placed to detect, treat, and prevent environmentally-related diseases and health conditions. Few mechanisms and structures are in place to enhance the recognition of environmental influences on human health, serve as repositories and sources of information for those concerned about children’s health and the environment, and promote action towards healthier and safer environments for children of today and adults of the future.

For health professionals to effectively protect children from environmental threats, specialized training is useful. Evidence shows that health providers are generally not provided the training that they need to address the complex environmental health issues with respect to air, water, soil, and products (Pope & Rall, 1995) Diarrhoeal diseases often recur frequently when underlying causes such as contaminated water are not taken into account by the health provider, understood by the community or adequately addressed by governments. The complexity of children’s environmental health (CEH) issues is compounded by the combination of legacy environmental issues, such as water quality and sanitation service delivery, with modern challenges such as transboundary contamination by persistent toxic substances, ozone depletion and hence ultraviolet and ionising radiation, global climate change, and exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals). For children in developing countries, the presence of all such risks represent a ‘triple burden of disease’ – a high level of communicable diseases, the increasingly severe burden of non-communicable diseases, and emerging risks from new diseases and additional stressors from the social and physical environment.

Definition of a Children’s Environmental Health Unit
A Children’s Environmental Health Unit (CEHU) is a centre that advances the ongoing training of health care providers, the ongoing education of the public and other sectors concerned about CEH on the protection of children from environmental threats, the management of children with known or suspected exposure to environmental stressors, and the diagnosis, management, and treatment of children with illnesses that are derived from environmental stressors.


Children’s Environmental Health Units educate health care professionals and others about preventing environmental exposures and about diagnosing and treating environmentally-related diseases. Their policy advice to government officials can strengthen governmental responses to environmental health problems. By maintaining databases and collaborating with partners in the health community, they can contribute to the knowledge base on children’s environmental health issues.


The development of this document was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under assistance agreement CR 831028 to the World Health Organization.
This publication was coordinated at WHO by Jenny Pronczuk de Garbino, Marie-Noel Bruné, and Ruth Etzel with the assistance of Tania Gavidia from the WHO Collaborating Centre in Perth, Australia.

The following people contributed to this publication:

Martha Berger
Irena Buka
Enrique Cifuentes
Lilian Corra
Fernando Díaz Barriga
Luis Roberto Escoto
Adriana Grebnicoff
Michael Hatcher
Raul Harari
Kapila Jayaratne
Amalia Laborde
Philip Landrigan
Sang-il Lee
Siobhan McNally
Helia Molina
Juan Antonio Ortega-García
Enrique Paris
Jerry Paulson
Leslie Rubin