Breast Milk Monitoring Programs (BMMPs): world-wide early warning system for polyhalogenated POPs and for targeting studies in children's environmental health.

Dniprodzerzhinsk, Kyiv, and Qzyl-Orda, names unfamiliar to most of us, are cities located literally on the other side of the globe, 12 time zones away, in the former Soviet Union countries of the Caucasus or Central Asia. Two exposure assessments of polychlorinated persistent organic pollutants (POPs), including the organochlorine pesti- cides (OCPs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and polychlorinated dibenzodioxins and furans (PCDDs/PCDFs), are part of longer term studies of children's health in these regions, and are described in this and recent issues of EHP (1-3). These studies use breast milk as a convenient, noninvasive means of estimating body burdens of these POPs in the mother, fetus, infant, and child. They illustrate the global interest in children's environmental health, particularly from exposures to POPs, whose stability makes them intrinsically hazardous, and hint at the formidable challenges, both sci- entific and nonscientific, that await researchers undertaking such studies.