Neurotoxin Water

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Neurotoxin Water

In Massachusetts, Contaminated Drinking Water Linked to Stillbirths

For nearly 20 years, New Englanders drank and bathed in water without knowing it was laced with a neurotoxin.The chemical leached into the water from vinyl coating sprayed inside water pipes in the late 1960s in response to complaints the water smelled and tasted funny.

More than half of New England's 1,050 milesof water pipes sprayed with the contaminant are in Massachusetts, mostly in the Cape Cod region. The poison, tetrachloroethylene or PCE, still widely used in dry cleaning, wasn'tdiscoveredin the water supply until 1979.

A newstudypublished in the journal Environmental Health shows that the exposure to the poison is linked to increased risk for stillbirths andother pregnancy complications.

Researchers led by Ann Aschengrau of Boston University School of Public Health surveyed women in eight contaminated Cape Cod towns who gave birth to one or more babies between 1969 and 1983.

They compared 1,091 PCE-exposed pregnancies to the same number of unexposed pregnancies from 1,766 women. The level of exposure to the poison was estimated using water-distribution modeling software.

Source: Washington Post

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