"We haven't had leadership in environmental issues in general and in children's environmental health issues in particular," said Gordon Garner, a member of the state Environmental Quality Commission.

The commission's staff Wednesday released the report, "Children's Environmental Health in Kentucky".

Garner said the document was the state's first comprehensive look at childhood illnesses and their potential relationships to the environment.

The report noted a dramatic rise - 45 percent - in the number of children being treated for asthma at hospitals from 2000 to 2003 in a state with air pollution problems and more than its share of smokers.

A third of the state's 1 million children live in the nine counties that the federal Environmental Protection Agency says have unsafe levels of ozone or soot in the air, the report said.

The commission recommended that the state create a Children's Environmental Health Partnership of experts to develop an action plan.

The report said the rate of brain cancer and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is higher in Kentucky than in the rest of the country. Studies have tied all those maladies to exposure to various forms of pollution.

The state's overall childhood cancer rate from 1997 through 2001 was 14.9 cases per 100,000 children, or slightly above the national rate of 14.73 per 100,000, the report said.

In 2002, Kentucky ranked eighth in the nation in the industrial release of mercury and mercury compounds.

Mercury has been shown to cause severe brain damage in infants whose mothers were exposed while pregnant.