- Study explores how toxic chemicals are ‘Stealing Children’s Future Potential’

Children of color and from low-income families are not only exposed to more dangerous substances but also experience disproportionate harm to their brain development, researchers report.

By Victoria St. Martin

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For over 2,000 years, the Indigenous people known as the Yupik have occupied St. Lawrence Island, a sliver of Alaska that rests in the Bering Sea just below the Arctic Circle and where, on a clear day, it’s said that one can see the coastline of Russia about 40 miles away.

To this day, residents maintain a subsistence lifestyle centered around the region’s fish and wildlife. Growing up on the island, Pangunnaaq Vi Waghiyi absorbed a simple lesson that has been passed down across the generations: “Our elders call the ocean our farm,” she related fondly in a recent phone interview.

But what happens when the ocean, the soil, and the air itself become polluted? 

Drawing on her familial roots at the top of the world, Waghiyi has been working with the environmental justice group known as Alaska Community Action on Toxics to help researchers answer those questions.

Now, a newly released review of more than 200 studies has concluded that children from low-income families and families of color are exposed to more neurotoxic chemicals—and experience greater harm from them—than young people from higher-income and white families.