Childhood and Adolescent Hygiene

a branch of hygiene that studies the influence of various factors of the environment on the bodies of children and that elaborates the hygienic requirements and norms of the child’s environment for the purpose of creating fully hygienic conditions of life to ensure the complete physical and mental development of children.

In the USSR, childhood and adolescent hygiene studies the problems of protecting and strengthening the health of the growing generation during the entire period of its development, from birth to the complete formation of the body. The methodological basis of childhood and adolescent hygiene is the thesis of the unity of organism and environment and of the close mutual connection of man and his social environment; its natural-scientific basis is the age physiology and morphology of the body. Childhood and adolescent hygiene concentrates on the general principles of growth and development of the child subject to sex, age, and biological and social factors; the dynamics of physical development; and the hygienic basis of educational, labor, and professional activity; it elaborates hygienic recommendations for organizing the daily regimes and the study and work activities of students in educational institutions of various types. Among the problems of childhood and adolescent hygiene are the hygienic bases of physical education, the hygienic principles of design and construction of children’s and adolescents’ institutions, and the hygienic foundations of sanitary norms and regime in children’s and adolescents’ institutions. The basic methods of childhood and adolescent hygiene are natural hygienic experimentation, health statistics, and laboratory experimentation.

Childhood and adolescent hygiene in socialist countries is developing in the same direction as that of the USSR. Significant research has been conducted in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the German Democratic Republic, and other countries. In capitalist countries childhood and adolescent hygiene is called school and university hygiene or school medicine. In the majority of countries the scope of its research is limited to the school, extending sometimes to institutions of higher learning. The content of childhood and adolescent hygiene is principally brought to problems of organizing medical services (early diagnosis, infectious-disease prophylaxis, determination of occupational fitness, and so on). The International Union of School and University Hygiene and Medicine was founded in 1959.