Pregnant women need to avoid drinking water with certain ag chemicals

Robert Kaska, 86, and wife Emily, 80, along with grandson Tyler Kaska, 23, who lives with them, use two 250-gallon former Atrazine 4L herbicide containers for water storage after their well went dry in August 2014 in Lissie, Texas. The water is not used for drinking; it is used for bathing, washing dishes and the bathrooms.

Robert Kaska, 86, and wife Emily, 80, along with grandson Tyler...

Pregnant women who rely on well water or public water with high levels of three common agriculture chemicals ought to be wary for their babies’ health, a Texas A&M University professor said.

Jean Brender is a former nurse and professor emeritus of public health who has studied the effects of drinking contaminated water for more than 20 years. She and a fellow researcher looked at 14 studies done over 16 years to see whether drinking water with atrazine, nitrates or arsenic puts fetuses at risk.

Some of the research Brender cited in her review, published in late March in the peer-reviewed journal “Current Environmental Health Reports,” came from her research on pregnant women in Texas and Iowa.

Atrazine is a readily available herbicide used on crops, lawns and turf. Nitrates often come from fertilizers.

“Because atrazine and nitrate are both used so heavily in agricultural areas, that’s where you’re going to find the problem,” Brender said.

Arsenic most often leaches from rocks but can derive from certain pesticides no longer in use.

Some studies Brender reviewed showed that mothers whose babies had missing portions of the brain, skull and scalp; neural tube defects; spina bifida; limb deficiencies; cleft palate and cleft lip were more likely to have consumed water high in nitrates.

Elevated levels of atrazine in nearby surface water was significantly associated with intestines outside the body, cleft lip, Down syndrome, excess fingers or toes and “other congenital anomalies,” her review found. In addition, arsenic was associated with spinal bifida, congenital heart defects and other birth defects.

Birth defects affect one in 33 babies born in the United States each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Two years ago, Brender and other scientists compared the drinking water of 3,300 mothers in Texas and Iowa who delivered babies with major birth defects with drinking water of 1,121 mothers in those states whose babies were healthy.

They found that mothers of babies with spina bifida, limb deficiencies, cleft palate and cleft lip were around twice as likely to have consumed about 5 milligrams of nitrates per day in drinking water, compared with women who consumed about 1 milligram per day.

The U.S. government already knew about many health effects associated with these chemicals in high enough doses. That’s why the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency maintains standards for public drinking water systems, known as maximum contaminant levels, at 3 parts per billion for atrazine, 10 ppm for nitrates and 10 ppb for arsenic.

Private groundwater wells are a different story. Regulations on drinking water do not apply to home-use wells, and many people who rely on groundwater have to test it themselves.

Few studies also considered how these chemicals interact with each other to form new, potentially harmful compounds, Brender said.

“We need to start branching out and look at this issue of mixtures and what impact that would have on public health,” she said.

Women in all likelihood have already been exposed to nitrates and atrazine, among many other chemicals with potential effects on fetal development, said Paul Winchester, an Indiana University School of Medicine physician and researcher. Winchester also serves as medical director of the neonatal intensive care unit at the Franciscan St. Francis Health hospital in Indianapolis. Brender and her colleague cited his work in their review.

In 2009, Winchester was the lead author in a peer-reviewed study that found a significant correlation between the amount of nitrates and atrazine in lakes, rivers and streams and the rates of several categories of birth defects. The study relied on federal data for water quality and records of more than 30 million births from 1996 to 2002.

Winchester pointed out that their study considered surface water, not drinking water, and did not account for women drinking bottled water or other variables that could have thrown off any patterns in the data.

“The odds of us finding a signature in all the uncertainties … are low because there’s so many things in between,” he said.

But the correlation was still clear, Winchester said. As nitrates and atrazine went up in summer months, so did birth defects in babies conceived at the time.

Syngenta, atrazine’s maker, has repeatedly said studies of atrazine show that it is safe, and a spokeswoman told The New Yorker in 2014 that “atrazine does not and, in fact, cannot cause adverse health effects at any level that people would ever be exposed to in the real-world environment.”

Brender urged women whose drinking water includes those three chemicals in concentrations above federal standards to consider switching to treated or bottled water ahead of a pregnancy.

“If I was going to think about having a baby, I probably would do that,” she said.

In Texas, drinking water systems with high arsenic levels are scattered across South Texas, West Texas and the Gulf Coast. Thirty-four have had persistent high arsenic for 10 years, according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project, a national group.

Small water systems in or near Eola, Flomont, Weinert, Midland, Turkey, Wichita Falls, Vernon, Lubbock, Welch and Quitaque had the highest nitrate levels in the state, according to EPA data from 2004 to 2009 collected by the Environmental Working Group, another environmental group. Each had averages from roughly 5 to 15 parts per million higher than the standard.

Atrazine turned up in the highest levels in water systems that serve a few thousand people, according to the Environmental Working Group. Some tests taken at water systems in Crosby, Cameron and Cooper had atrazine levels above the standard.

Study Results

Source: San Antonio Express-News

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