Partnership for children's health and the environment.

Compared to adults, children are disproportionately and uniquely vulnerable to environmental toxicants, a reality that the children's environmental health movement has sought to bring to the attention of policy makers and government agencies over the past decade. In 1999, the Children's Health Environmental Coalition and the Institute for Children's Environmental Health convened the Children's Environmental Health Summit. Following that summit, the Partnership for Children's Health and the Environment was formed as a means for building and sustaining the movement's growing momentum. Today this partnership of North American governmental, academic, and community groups has a membership of almost 100 organizations. Its website, located at http://www.partnersforchildren.org/, is designed to promote its agenda and to educate the public about children's environmental health issues.

The partnership's guiding principles are set forth on their own separate page of the site. These principles include the rights of children to clean air, food, and drinking water; to healthy homes and other built environments where they spend the majority of their time (such as schools); and to information about health and safety risks that could possibly compromise their health.

The Collaborative Initiatives page provides links to the websites of partnership members and brief overviews of their philosophies and activities. The partnership's membership is far-reaching, including national, state, and local environmental and health advocacy groups; federal agencies; professional associations; academic centers; and international organizations including the Commission for Environmental Cooperation of North America.

The Major Consensus Statements page includes the full text of five important declarations relevant to children's environmental health. These statements, developed by various bodies over the past several years, have done much to focus international attention on the differences between child and adult health effects stemming from environmental exposures and on related issues such as environmental justice. Among the texts available on this page are the statement from the multidisciplinary international work session on the effects of environmental endocrine-disrupting chemicals that was held in Erice, Sicily, in November 1995 and the Declaration of the Environment Leaders of the Eight on Children's Environmental Health that was developed at the May 1997 summit of the environmental ministers of the eight major industrialized countries.

The homepage features a list of finks to recently released children's environmental health resources, including reports, educational guides, and new partnership member websites. Recent additions include links to The Guide to Playgrounds and Arsenic Wood (a publication of the non-profit Healthy Schools Network) and the Emerging Links series (reports by Physicians for Social Responsibility on environmental contributions to certain chronic diseases). A comprehensive page of pertinent upcoming meetings features summaries of meeting topics and activities as well as links to meeting websites.