중남미

Megacities around the world have significant problems with air pollution (Molina and Molina, 2004; Chen and Kan, 2008; Parrish and Zhu, 2009). Metropolitan Mexico City (MC) – an example of extreme urban growth and serious environmental pollution with 20 million people, over 40,000 industries and four million vehicles – exhibits marked regional differences in air pollutants concentrations including industrial and mobile sources of contaminants (Ezcurra and Mazari-Hiriart, 1996; Moreno et al., 2008; Querol et al., 2008; Salcedo et al., 2010). Eight million MC children experienced serious detrimental effects including neuroinflammation, neurodegeneration, and cognition deficits (Calderón-Garcidueñas et al., 2008a,b,c, 2011a,b, 2012). Neighborhoods’ proximity to main roadways, unpaved roads, dumps, and factories affect children’s health and 27% of the MC population mostly to the north and east falls in this category (Figure 1).