Recent environmental health resources

• Breathing Easy from Home to School, from PolicyLink, offers strategies to communities
  reduce childhood asthma, such as reducing truck traffic and requiring landlords to check apartments for mold.
  
• Initiating Change: Creating an Asthma-Friendly School, from the Centers for Disease Control, is a tool kit to help advocates push schools to better serve children with asthma.
  
• Children living in areas with more street trees have lower prevalence of asthma, a study in the May 2008 issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, found that New York City preschoolers who lived on streets with more trees had significantly lower asthma rates than their peers, even after taking into account other factors. Summary
  from the BBC.



• Why Place Matters: Building the Movement for Healthy Communities, from PolicyLink, discusses how environmental factors contribute to a healthy community.

• Environmental Policy as Social Policy?, from the National Bureau of Economic Research, finds that a significant reason for recent declines in violent crime is because children were exposed to the less lead after abatement efforts in the '70s and '80s (the study controlled for other factors).

Some recent reports and studies about the potential harmful effects of specific products:

• Toxic Baby Furniture: The Latest Case for Making Products Safe from the Start, from Environment California.
• Fire Retardants in Toddlers and Their Mothers, from the Environmental Working Group.
• Prenatal and Postnatal Exposure to Cell Phone Use and Behavioral Problems in
  Children, a study in the July 2008 issue of Epidemiology. Summary of this and other cell phone studies from the LA Times.