Child health has improved considerably in most of the countries in the European Union during the last decades. The mortality due to prematurity, infectious diseases, cardiac malformations and cancer has never been so low. The infant mortality is lower in most of the European countries than in the USA. However, there are a number of increasing problems like diseases due to lifestyle, misuse of antibiotics, resistance against vaccination. Economic crises like that in Greece affect children in particular. The health care for refugee children is not as good as for the inborn citizens. Neuropsychiatric problems seem to increase. The aim of this article is to encourage pediatricians in the EU to lobby for good health in the EU. Children are usually not organized in unions and they have no votes; therefore, their political influence is weak.

The state of health and the risk for disease in adulthood, largely depend on adverse events taking place during the preconceptional, prenatal, neonatal period and/or first years of life.1 The long-term consequences of several stressors happen in the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) concept, which implies epigenetic changes. The latter are heritable changes in gene expression not affecting the underlying DNA sequence, occurring during phases of developmental plasticity. Thus, the origins of chronic noncommunicable diseases later in life are set before birth as subtle functional changes in gene expression and protein production, cell numbers and metabolism. However, a second, or even a third “hit” or challenge early postnatally and later in life, respectively, might be needed in order to manifest elusive functional changes induced prenatally.

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