You thought sending your child in an air-conditioned bus to school and giving her bottled water and packaged food will keep her in good health. Think again. While we talk of quality benchmarks like ISO from a beauty salon to a bed mattress, we ignore the need for a regulatory framework when it comes to the safety of our children. The number of elements a child encounters that are potentially harmful in a day is humongous. There is an urgent need to develop benchmarks to make the child’s life more secure. Just look at the toxins children are exposed to at school, the place where they spend almost fourteen years of their life. Experts have outlined the ‘‘hazardous dozen’’ areas of primary concern that actually do not cost huge sums of money to address. If a school must use pesticides, they should notify parents and teachers a day in advance and use the least toxic materials possible. Art rooms should have proper ventilation as many art supplies are toxic and become airborne, irritating the lungs and bronchial tubes. Care should be taken that children do not put pencil tips in their mouth; use of plastic pencils with changeable lead tips must be encouraged. Chalk must be eliminated from classrooms by using white board and markers. Else, teachers should take precautions that they do not leave bits of chalks in the classrooms. When new carpeting is ordered, the carpet, as well as the carpet backing, should be required to be formaldehyde-free and should use non-toxic adhesives. Processed or treated wood, often used for playground equipment and picnic tables, is impregnated with copper and arsenic in order to deter pest infestation; the latter is a human carcinogen. If a school has already invested in products made out of processed wood they should paint the surfaces to stop the arsenic from leaching. Children must not wait at bus stops where many buses are idling for long periods of time as the incoming air is laden with diesel and car exhaust. Mold can grow in damp areas and many children and adults are allergic to this mold; therefore wet areas should be remedied. Chemistry labs using hazardous materials should be properly ventilated, making sure the exhaust does not enter other parts of the building. And students must be provded with face masks during experiments. Copy machines and printers emit out-gas ozone and therefore rooms should be well ventilated. There must be testing for radon and lead since radon has high levels of human lung carcinogen. Drinking water should be tested for lead that can come from pipes with lead soldering. Finally, schools should be smoke-free environments. To identify hazardous products, we could look for words and symbols that indicate the product is corrosive, toxic, reactive or flammable. But it would be so much easier if we could see a smiling monkey on products our children our exposed to. The smiling monkey would let us know that our child is safe. That would be a child mark. The writer is COO, Global Education Management Systems, India
