Think Pollution Isn't Costing You? Bzzzzzzzzzzzztttt - Wrong!

Childhood diseases of environmental origin cost Americans $54.9 billion annually, according to a new study by scientists at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, released today in Environmental Health Perspectives (www.ehponline.org), the journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

The total, 2.8 percent of all U.S. healthcare costs, is more than Americans spend on military research, veterans' benefits and health care costs of stroke.

The Mount Sinai study, the first to assess the costs of pediatric disease of toxic environmental origin, measured the contribution of environmental pollutants to the incidence, prevalence, mortality and costs of pediatric disease in American children.

"The findings confirm our view that disease of environmental origin cause not only great misery but pose large costs on American children and their families," said Dr. Philip Landrigan, a leading researcher in children's health and head of the Center for Children's Health and the Environment at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.