Paloma Beamer
Publications
Mexican-born children living in the United States have a lower prevalence of asthma than other US children. Although children of Mexican descent near the Arizona (AZ)-Sonora border are genetically similar, differences in environmental exposures might result in differences in asthma prevalence across this region.
Young children's mouthing activities thought to be among the most important exposure pathways. Unfortunately, mouthing activity studies have only been conducted in a few countries. In the current study, we used videotaping and computer-based translating method to obtain mouthing activity data for 66 children aged 7-35 months in Taiwan. The median indoor hand-to-mouth and object-to-mouth frequencies were 8.91 and 11.39 contacts/h, respectively. The median indoor hand-to-mouth and object-to-mouth hourly contact durations were 0.34 and 0.46 min/h, respectively. The indoor object-to-mouth activities were significantly and negatively correlated with age. Children aged 12 to 24 months in the current study had lower indoor hand-to-mouth and object-to-mouth frequencies than children of same age group in the United States. We also found that indoor mouthing duration with pacifier was significantly and negatively correlated with indoor mouthing duration with other non-dietary objects. The results of the current study indicate that the mouthing behaviors may be different between different countries or populations with different ethnic or lifestyle characteristics. We conclude that using hand-to-mouth frequency values from the current literature may not be most reliable for estimating non-dietary exposures of young children living in Taiwan or even in other similar Asian countries.Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology advance online publication, 16 July 2014; doi:10.1038/jes.2014.50.