• pollution
• child’s health

As practising paediatricians we may suffer from a certain cognitive dissonance about environmental pollution: we have been told that it is bad for children’s health, but only rarely can we directly attribute a child’s illness to their pollution exposure, at least in the West. The epidemiological evidence of a link between various form of pollution and ill-health has been covered in depth by a Lancet special commission (Landrigan P et al. 2017. doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)32345-0). This lengthy feature looks at the issue from a global perspective, and follows on from a similarly authoritative and disconcerting report from two Royal Colleges (the RCP and RCPCH), focussing …