Study shows higher rate of birth defects in Corpus Christi TX area

[Ilsa]

Study shows higher rate of birth defects in Corpus Christi area

http://www.thevictoriaadvocate.com/old_front/story/3590598p-4150539c.html

SNIP

The study by the Texas Department of State Health Services analyzed six years of data from a state registry of birth defects. It found that Corpus Christi babies were 17 percent more likely to have a severe birth defect and nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with any birth defect.


Concerned residents requested the study to determine if there's a link between birth defects and environmental hazards such as refineries, chemical plants and landfills in Nueces County.


Dr. Peter Langlois, senior state epidemiologist with the department of health services, said further investigation is warranted. A second phase of the study will examine where mothers lived in relation to potentially hazardous sites. It should take at least a year.

SNIP

The study analyzed 170 potentially severe birth defects that occurred between 1996 and 2002. Sixteen types of defects were found at a rate 50 percent or greater than the state average.

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Our niece was born in CC 10 years ago. She is now experiencing heart problems, and has been a healthy child until now.

[Ian David]

1. Only liberals and their damn statistics believe in these things...

and what are statistics, but a collection of quantifiable "facts" about "reality"? And we all know that reality has a well-known Liberal bias.

Republicans are more concerned about fobidding people from aborting the babies they don't want, then about protecting the babies people do want.

[skipos]

3. Republicans only care about life until it comes out of the womb. nt

[mntleo2]

2. Years Ago...

I remember reading much the same statistics in The Nation about spina bifida and other birth defects. One of the considerations in the article was what they do across the border in Mexico because they seem to have no concern about whatever they spew into the environment. One of the main reasons along with cheap labor American companies moved down there was so they can ignore the impact on the environment and let their factories puke whatever vile crap they wanted and nobody can (or will) do anything about it. I am not sure how close to the border CC is, but it might also be something for local citizens to comtemplate.

My 2 cents

Cat In Seattle

[Ilsa]

5. I think they found the cause for the spina bifida problems along

the Texas border. There was a high rate of consumption of locally produced corn tortillas that were contaminated, IIRC. I'll see if I can find the article.

[Ilsa]

7. Here it is:

http://www.narconews.com/~myco/Mycoherbicide.info/NEWS/fumonisin_in_us_corn.htm

Corn toxin examined in border birth defects
Diet may have put Hispanics at risk

03/04/2001

By Laura Beil / The Dallas Morning News

SNIP

State and national investigators would eventually find that Brownsville had an astonishingly high rate of anencephaly, as the condition is called. From 1989 through 1991, 32 women in this town of 130,000 carried anencephalic babies. Many of the children died within hours, and all within days, of birth.

SNIP

Still searching for a cause, many experts keep circling back to one of the few explanations for an epidemic that can come and go on its own: a natural poison that crept in and out of the food supply. Disease investigators have focused on a common toxin found in corn, a mainstay of a traditional Mexican-American diet. If this toxin is indeed responsible for the birth defects that stalked the Lower Rio Grande Valley – and no one has yet concluded that it is – then Texas health officials worry about other effects in Hispanics. In addition to birth defects, the chemical may increase the risk for esophageal and liver cancer.

The outbreak of 1991 remains unsolved. From the beginning, many residents suspected the pesticides that armor nearby fields of cotton and sorghum. Others blamed the chemicals that waft from industries along the Rio Grande. Some parents of affected infants even shared a $17 million settlement from more than 80 maquiladoras – U.S. factories hugging the Mexican side of the river – in 1995.

But now, state health officials wonder whether the culprit was not man-made, but a natural fungus that can cling to corn. The fungus makes a toxin, called fumonisin, unknown to science until 1988.

SNIP

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[donsu]

4. it's about time these stats were made public - do W. Va. next

Tenn., and Ky.

and moan in sadness at the findings.

[anarch]

6. Gosh..."a link between birth defects and environmental hazards...

such as refineries, chemical plants and landfills"?? Ya think? :banghead: