WASHINGTON (Cox News Service) -- Although death rates from many types of cancer are falling, the reported incidence of cancer and other diseases among America's children is rising, pediatricians said Tuesday.

Too little is known about possible relationships between childhood disease and an environmental "soup" of thousands of mostly untested industrial chemicals that didn't even exist a half-century ago, they said.

"There are 85,000 chemicals registered with the Environmental Protection Agency for commercial use in America," said Dr. Philip Landrigan, director of the Center for Children's Health and the Environment at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

Virtually all of them did not exist before the 1960s and most have not been sufficiently tested for their effect on human beings, he added.

Landrigan said he was not "such a Luddite" to argue that all chemicals are bad, citing as valuable substances penicillin and the spray-can penetrating oil, WD-40, which he jokingly said has been called "the basic liquid of modern civilization."

However, he said the rush to develop and embrace new chemicals has left adequate testing behind. Only about 43 percent of roughly 3,000 "high-production-volume" chemicals were found to have been tested in a 1998 analysis, he said.

"There has been a real failure of regulatory oversight in that we've allowed many thousands of chemicals to be commercialized without adequately testing them," Landrigan said.

Landrigan and Dr. Herbert J. Needleman, the University of Pittsburgh researcher who has been credited with exposing the chronic intelligence-robbing impact of environmental lead poisoning, said they hoped through a series of newspaper advertisements, public appearances and an Internet page to stimulate a public demand for more understanding of toxic chemicals on human health.

Full-page ads in The New York Times are being financed by a grant of $400,000 from the Rockefeller Family Fund, Landrigan said.

The need to better understand the impact of individual chemicals, as well as "synergistic" effect of combined exposures, is urgent, both physician-researchers said at a press conference.

"Untold numbers of children have paid a price for our sluggishness in getting rid of lead" in gasoline, said Needleman.

Landrigan said that when he was in medical school, cancer in children was "always fatal, and you just tried to keep them around for a year or two, to give the parents time to adjust to reality."

Now, he said, from 35 to 40 percent of children with brain cancer can be cured through surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy, and an even greater proportion of childhood leukemia victims are cured.

"But cancer remains the largest cause of disease death among children and the overall incidence has steadily risen," he said. There has been a 25 percent rise in the incidence of childhood leukemia since the 1960s and a 21 percent increase in brain cancer.

"Our knowledge of what's going on here is incomplete," he said. "While we have focused on treating cancer we have not kept our eyes on the causes."

In addition to cancer-causing substances, Landrigan warned of "endocrine disrupting" chemicals, which he said may be linked to premature puberty in girls, growing numbers of testicular cancer in boys and penis malformation in a condition known as hypospadia.

The last condition has doubled, from approximately 40 incidents per 10,000 live boy births to around 80 incidents per 10,000 births in Atlanta between 1968 and 1983, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"It's time in the United States that we begin to take deliberate action (regarding toxic chemicals)," he said. "During the first few years of the chemical revolution, we were carried along with enthusiasm. Now we know there is a downside. Shame on us if we don't do the necessary tests."

Copyright 2002 Cox News Service. All rights reserved.