We know that all of the toxins and pollutants we — and our families — are exposed to every day can have high costs when it comes to our health. Now the Michigan Network for Children’s Environmental Health is examining the financial costs of children’s toxic chemical exposure. Their just-released report examines the environmentally attributable direct and indirect health care costs of four childhood diseases linked to environmental toxins — asthma, lead poisoning, pediatric cancer and neurodevelopmental disorders. The treatment for these health issues costs Michigan an average of $5.85 billion a year! Just think how much money one state could save by protecting children from environmental toxins, and thus helping to reduce the number of children affected by these preventable diseases.
The Michigan Network for Children’s Environmental Health, the group at the helm of the report, The Price of Pollution: Cost Estimates of Environment-Related Childhood Disease in Michigan, is an Ann-Arbor based coalition of health and environmental groups. They modeled their study after a 2002 study from the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York that studied the costs of these preventable childhood diseases nationwide.
In the Mt. Sinai study, researchers defined environmental pollutants as “toxic chemicals of human origin in air, food, water, and communities,” and used data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and others. Because some costs associated with these disease aren’t due to environmental toxins, the researchers determined percentages to help estimate costs. They judged the environmental attributable fraction to be 100% for lead poisoning, 30% for asthma, 5% for cancer and 10% for neurobehavioral disorders.
In 2002, the total annual cost estimate for the country was $54.9 billion, or 2.8 of total U.S. health care costs. Broken down by disease: $43.4 billion for lead poisoning, $2 billion for asthma, $0.3 billion for childhood cancer, and $9.2 billion for neurobehavioral disorders.
The 2010 study in Michigan estimated costs for each childhood disease to be $4.85 billion for lead poisoning, $88.4 million for asthma, $17.3 million for pediatric cancer, and $845 million for neurodevelopmental disorders.
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