QUOTABLE:
Donald R. Mattison

“Maternal and paternal environmental exposures can produce human developmental disease including preterm birth, growth restriction, functional or structural abnormalities or death. Our understanding of developmental diseases is changing; we recognize that environmental exposures during development can be expressed across the life of the individual, into adulthood. In addition, we now know that paternal exposures can result in developmental disease in their offspring. Of greatest concern, however, is the growing recognition that functional impacts of environmental exposures may not have thresholds. This means that the only reasonable approach is to keep environmental exposures for all individuals as low as possible.”

— Donald R. Mattison,
in “Environmental Exposures
and Development,”
Current Opinion in Pediatrics, 2010