WUC NEWS: birth defects

<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What and why is this happening no one knows or don't like to talk about it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">“Horrible medical mystery… alarming rate of birth defects” in Washington — Babies missing parts of brain, skull — Mother outraged at gov’t — Nurse: “It’s very scary… absolutely something going on” — Cluster surrounds most polluted US nuclear site, yet never mentioned by media or officials"</span></h2>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As state and federal officials document the alarming rise of deadly birth defects in rural Washington, health experts are at a loss when it comes to pinpointing the source of the problem.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the three years prior to January 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found there had been 23 cases of anencephaly – a birth defect in which a child is born without parts of their brain or skull – reported in three Washington counties: Benton, Franklin and Yakima. This rate of 8.4 cases per 10,000 live births quickly attracted the attention of health officials, especially since it’s four times the national average</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Anencephaly wasn’t the only severe birth defect confirmed by the CDC, however. Three cases of spina bifida were also uncovered, a condition that involves the failure of a baby’s spine and brain to develop properly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Since the publication of the report last year, another eight or nine cases of anencephaly and spina bifida have been reported by Susie Ball, a counselor at the Central Washington Genetics Program.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The most worrisome aspect of the whole situation isn’t simply the increased rate of the defects, but the fact that no one is quite sure what’s causing the problem. According to a report by NBC News, the CDC inspected the medical records of hundreds of individuals, looking for disparities between mothers whose children suffered birth defects and those whose children were fine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Despite examining disease history, the types of medication taken, the source of the water used by mothers, and other factors, the research ultimately yielded disappointing results.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“No statistically significant differences were identified between cases and controls, and a clear cause of the elevated prevalence of anencephaly was not determined,”</em> the CDC report stated.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">~ Three Counties Reporting Higher Number of Birth Defects ~</span></h2>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">An <em style="border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">alarming number of severe birth defects</em> in three counties of rural Washington state is causing some concern for health experts, who say they can find no cause, even as reports of new cases continue to climb.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Federal and state officials will not say how many cases have been reported in a three-county area near Yakima, Washington, of women having had babies with <strong style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/anencephaly.html" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; color: #11598f; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="Anencephaly">anencephaly</a></strong>, a devastating condition in which they are born missing parts of the brain or skull.</span></div>
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<img alt="Alarming Number of Severe Birth Defects Stun Washington State Counties" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1725" data-wp-pid="1725" height="260" src="http://www.jeannemelanson.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Alarming-Number-of-Severe-Birth-Defects-Stun-Washington-State-Counties.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0.4em auto 1.625em; max-width: 97.5%; padding: 6px;" width="400" /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Officials admit they haven’t interviewed any of the women in question, or told the mothers there’s a potentially widespread problem</strong>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One year ago, officials with the Washington state health department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had counted nearly two dozen cases in three years, a rate four times the national average.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Since then, one local genetic counselor, Susie Ball of the <strong style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.yakimamemorial.org/medical-services-genetics-program.asp" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; color: #11598f; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Central Washington Genetics Program</a></strong> at Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital, says she has reported “eight or nine” additional cases of anencephaly and spina bifida, another birth defect in which the neural tube, which forms the brain and spine, fails to close properly.</span></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And still, no one is telling the mothers that there is a problem.</span></strong></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">State and CDC officials have stated that, “small clusters of birth defects often turn out to be nothing more than sad coincidence.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As of last summer, an investigation revealed that 27 women with pregnancies in resulted in neural tube defects in Yakima, Franklin and Benton counties between 2010 and 2013. That included 23 cases of <strong style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/anencephaly.html" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; color: #11598f; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">anencephaly</a></strong>. There were three cases of <strong style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/spinabifida/index.html" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; color: #11598f; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">spina bifida</a></strong> and one with <strong style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/encephalocele.html" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; color: #11598f; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">encephalocele</a></strong>, a sac-like protrusion of the brain through the front or back of the skull.</span></div>
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<img alt="Alarming Number of Severe Birth Defects Stun Washington State Counties" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1726" data-wp-pid="1726" height="323" src="http://www.jeannemelanson.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Alarming-Number-of-Severe-Birth-Defects-Stun-Washington-State-Counties-2.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0.4em auto 1.625em; max-width: 97.5%; padding: 6px;" width="400" /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">They publicly posted the results of the investigation in press releases and on state and federal websites. Those were picked up in news stories, including one in the local newspaper, the Yakima Herald-Republic. “State says no cause found for birth defect in Yakima County,” the <strong style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.yakimaherald.com/home/1327510-8/state-says-no-cause-found-for-birth-defect" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; color: #11598f; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">July headline </a></strong>read.</span></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But there was no actual effort to reach to families who had given birth to these deformed babies, and no one knows if the mothers were even aware of the findings.</span></strong></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mandy Stahre, the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer based in Washington state, who led the inquiry stated that there very few of them that could spend time doing this investigation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“I’m not sure the women knew they were part of a cluster.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Investigators looked over the medical records of the 27 area women with affected pregnancies and 108 matched controls who received care at the same 13 prenatal clinics.  They examined where the women worked, what diseases they had, whether they smoked or drank alcohol, what kind of medications they took.  They looked at where they lived and whether they got their water from a public source or a private well. They looked at race and whether the problem was more pronounced in the area’s migrant farm workers or in other residents.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Experts in neural tube defects say health officials should look harder and spread the word about what they find.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Allison Ashley-Koch, a professor at the Duke University Medical Center for Human Genetics said:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“Any time you see a geographic cluster of a pretty severe birth defect, it does make you wonder if there is a common exposure contributing.  If there were resources, it really would be wonderful to go back to the families to conduct more intensive interviews regarding common environmental exposures.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In a well-documented case in <strong style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://www.dshs.state.tx.us/birthdefects/NTD_border.shtm" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; color: #11598f; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Texas in April 1991</a></strong>, in which three babies with anencephaly were born in a Brownsville hospital within 36 hours surveillance and research discovered that the problem could be traced in part to the lack of folic acid in the diets of the mostly Hispanic women who lived on the Texas-Mexico border. Obesity and diabetes appeared to be factors, as did exposure to fumonisins, or grain molds.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Research has shown that there are potential links between anencephaly and exposure to molds and to pesticides.  Central Washington is a prime agricultural area that produces crops from apples and cherries to potatoes and wheat, which may require pesticides that contain nitrates.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">CDC and state officials refused to tell NBC News how many new cases they’d received in 2013, but that they had  received “a few more cases” after the original investigation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The situation should be more widely publicized to let local women of child-bearing age know the risk and to help them take action to prevent birth defects.  Health officials could — and should — do more.</span></div>

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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">CDC says that women who become pregnant should make sure they are taking folic acid, which can help prevent spina bifida.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Source:</strong> </span></div>
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<span style="color: #373737; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 23.625px;">http://enenews.com</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-health/bizarre-cluster-severe-birth-defects-stuns-health-experts-n24986" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; color: #11598f; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">JoNel Aleccia, NBC NEWS – “Bizarre Cluster of Severe Birth Defects Stuns Health Experts”</a></span></div>
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Medical mystery: Alarming rate of birth defects” in Washington

What and why is this happening no one knows or don't like to talk about it. CNN had reported: “Horrible medical mystery… alarming r...

WUC NEWS

Medical mystery: Alarming rate of birth defects” in Washington

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