Sandra Steingraber, the Cornell ecologist and author who studies health effects of exposure to environmental toxins, is featured in a Bill Moyers television special report, "Kids and Chemicals," scheduled to air on PBS stations Friday, May 10, at 9 p.m.

The episode in Moyers' "NOW" series is described as a cross-country investigation into the causes of childhood illnesses that might be caused by environmental toxins, including asthma, leukemia and other cancers, as well as learning and behavioral disabilities.

At Cornell, Steingraber is a visiting professor in the Center for the Environment's Breast Cancer and Environmental Risk Factors (BCERF) program and the author, most recently, of Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood .

The PBS television crew filmed Steingraber at her log cabin in Ellis Hollow, at Ithaca College where she delivered a lecture on cancer and the environment, at the GreenStar cooperative market, on walking trails in the Snyder Hill area and at an Ellis Hollow nursery school playground.

Subsequent toxicological tests at the nursery school found elevated levels of arsenic compounds in the playground soil, apparently from pressure-treated wood in the school's play-scape. Since the PBS special was filmed, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced a ban -- effective in 2004 -- on chromated copper arsenate (CCA) wood for residential and playground construction, and the use of that type of preserved wood is being investigated by the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission. Steingraber says arsenic exposure has been linked to the type of cancer she had as a college student, bladder cancer. She has enrolled 3 year-old Faith, the in utero subject of her latest book, in a different preschool. CCA-preserved wood.