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Keeping Our Children Safe

1 Issue
5 It's a long story
9 Top card
12 First-class
13 Adjoin
14 Hip
15 Roué
16 Radial companion
17 Large flightless bird
18 Clublike weapon
20 Three-masted ship of the Mediterranean
22 Attractive
25 Buccaneer
26 Tolerate
27 Blue-gray
28 Direct
29 Whimsical
30 Sting or manta
33 Ogled
35 Form of oxygen
37 TV laughter
40 Mediterranean tree
41 Hives
42 Strike breaker
43 Meadow
44 Velocity relative to the speed of sound
46 Sudden assault
50 Average
51 Malarial fever
52 Tubular pasta
53 Donkey
54 Devices for fishing
55 Otherwise

Solution Next Week

1 Holyfield's loss
2 Extinct flightless bird
3 Press
4 Swarmed
5 Impertinent
6 Competent
7 Colt, eg
8 Loss of muscle coordination
9 One-celled protozoa
10 Ajax rival
11 Develop
19 Malt beverage
21 Before
22 Bus alternative
23 Japanese sash
24 Neither here nor there
25 Wield
27 Platform or trundle
29 G-man
30 Fabled bird
31 Black bird
32 Affirmative reply
33 Conclusion
34 Enlisted person in the U.S. Navy
35 Wood sorrel
36 City in SW Poland
37 Guilt
38 Regions
39 Approaches
40 Pains
42 Short tail
45 Ripen
47 To be unwell
48 "__ a lie!"
49 Buy the farm

What you can do to protect them from hazards in the air they breathe, the foods they eat, and more
Part 1 of a 5 part weekly series

by Jim Gould

Spencer Mitchell's favorite place to play is his own backyard. But for Spencer, 2, an outdoor romp is potentially deadly. He has asthma, and he lives in Atlanta, where air quality has declined as the city has grown.

"On those days that they give air-quality warnings, I don't let him out," says Spencer's mother, Davetta Johnson Mitchell. In the last year and a half, Spencer has been hospitalized twice because of asthma attacks. "He has to work so hard to breathe," says his mother. "It's just awful."

It's been awful for a lot of American children in recent years. Asthma deaths have increased 40 percent since 1982. Childhood cancers are up 15 percent since 1973, and they continue to climb. A growing number of researchers are certain that both of those statistics -- as well as a variety of maladies ranging from skin irritations to fatigue and behavioral problems -- can be directly linked to the toxic soup of bad chemicals, air, and water that youngsters eat, breathe, and play in.

More than 70,000 new chemical compounds have been dispersed into our environment since 1950. "We are conducting a massive toxicological trial, and our children and their children are the experimental animals," warns Philip J. Landrigan, M.D., a professor of pediatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and the director of a 1993 National Academy of Sciences study that demonstrated the risks pesticides pose to children.

Next week: Part 2 - The Good News

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