Book Review: “Attention, parents: Now that you’ve seen your kids’ first report cards of the year, it’s time for a little homework of your own. No doubt you’re doing the best you can to ensure your little ones’ eventual membership in Mensa — promoting stimulating dinner conversation, reading a chapter together each night, maybe even playing Mozart during bath time. But wait — there’s more. You’ll find your next assignment in the pages of Colleen Moore’s Silent Scourge: Children, Pollution, and Why Scientists Disagree.

You probably already know that lead is not an appropriate component of any cerebral calisthenics program. But nor is it the only pollutant that can stunt intellectual development. In Silent Scourge, Moore, a developmental psychologist, reviews the case against lead and five additional types of pollutants — mercury, PCBs, pesticides, noise, and radioactive and chemical wastes.” —Grist As a psychiatrist, I have always paid attention to the subtle cerebral insults that create less-than-obvious impairments in intellectual and emotional functioning and behavior. I keep an environmental toxicology textbook on my desk at the hospital and like to think I see alot of influences on my patients to which psychiatrists without such an orientation might be less sensitive. I have often wondered why it is not plausible to think that the overall environmental assault our unaccustomed organisms suffer is not taking its toll, and especially on the critical stages of CNS development in childhood. This book is definitely on my reading list, as a parent as well as a mental health proessional.