Center for Early Lifestage Vulnerabilities to Environmental Stressors - Cumulative Health Impacts for Children in Underserved Rural Agricultural Communities in the United States

The EPA’s Office of Children’s Health Protection (OCHP) plays an essential role in carrying out the agency’s mission to protect children where they live, learn, and play and works closely with EPA’s program and regional offices to ensure that EPA actions and programs address the unique vulnerabilities of children. Exposures to mixtures of chemicals, along with non-chemical environmental stressors such as poverty, limited access to services, and changing conditions found in our everyday environment, may pose developmental and life-long health risks to children. Pollutant exposure during pregnancy and early childhood may be a crucial determinant of their lifetime health and has been associated with adverse neurodevelopment, childhood cancers, and other adverse health outcomes. Children in underserved, rural agricultural communities may be exposed to agricultural chemicals through ambient air, water, and soil, in addition to exposure to these chemicals via take-home and occupational routes (for adolescents). Moreover, adverse health outcomes in these children resulting from exposure to chemicals may be exacerbated by non-chemical stressors. There is an urgent research need to investigate adverse cumulative health impacts from exposures to chemical and non-chemical stressors for children in these communities in order to effectively reduce early childhood and lifetime health disparities.EPA is interested in supporting a transdisciplinary research center that will investigate the cumulative health impacts of early lifestage (prenatal and childhood up to adolescence) exposures to pollutants in conjunction with other relevant non-chemical stressors among children in underserved, rural agricultural communities in the United States.