By Steve Carmody
A new study finds (click here) there was not a significant increase in fetal deaths in Flint during the city’s drinking water crisis.
Many in Flint have wondered if stillbirths between 2014 and 2016 were due to increased lead levels in the city’s drinking water. A 2017 report suggested Flint had seen a 58% increase in fetal deaths. But the report was criticized by academics and the state health department.
But Virginia Tech researcher Siddhartha Roy says comparing records before, during and after the water crisis shows no evidence of increased fetal deaths or negative fertility rates.
“We have tried to look every which ever way that available models and available data sets could give us signals of possible increase in fetal deaths,” said Roy. “And we found nothing.”...
The study points to other statistics to state there was no increase in fetal deaths less than 20 weeks. That is possible when looking over longer periods of time, but, this increase happened during the poisoning of the water, there is on doubt why the increase occured. Some spontaneous abortions may have happened anyway but not an increase.
A couple of things happen in pregnancy that mitigates the lead in a pregnant woman's body. First there is information from "The March of Dimes." The focus is on the woman because she would have ingested the lead in the water and it would cross the placenta.
Yes. You can pass lead to your baby through the placenta. The placenta grows in your uterus (womb) and supplies your baby with food and oxygen through the umbilical cord.
Exposure to high levels of lead before and during pregnancy can cause:
- - Fertility problems, like reduced sperm count or abnormal sperm. Sperm in a man’s semen fertilizes a woman's egg to get her pregnant. Sperm count is the number of sperm in a man’s semen when he ejaculates.
- - High blood pressure (also called hypertension). This is when the force of blood against the walls of your blood vessels is too high. High blood pressure can cause problems during pregnancy.
- - Problems with the development of your baby’s brain and nervous system. The nervous system includes your brain, spinal cord and nerves. Your nervous system helps you move, think and feel. Babies exposed to lead before birth are likely to have learning problems and slow growth.
- - Premature birth. This is birth that happens too early, before 37 weeks of pregnancy.
- - Low birthweight. This is when your baby weighs less than 5 pounds, 8 ounces at birth.
- - Miscarriage. This is when a baby dies in the womb before 20 weeks of pregnancy....
The thing about pregnancy is that women can mitigate the potency of the lead in their bodies by taking vitamins. All pregnant women receiving prenatal vitamins cause competition with lead by those vitamins and the possibility of a woman passing lead to her in utero infant is diminished, but, not completely stopped.
Zinc, selenium and iron are only three of the minerals that will mitigate toxicity of lead to the mother and the baby.
January 14, 2014
By Qixiao Zhai, Arjan Narbad, and Wei Chen
...In summary, (click here) these essential metals decrease intestinal Cd and Pb absorption, recover the essential metal homeostasis and alleviate the oxidative stress caused by Cd and Pb toxicity. Diet associated essential metal supplementation should be regarded as important for essential metal-deficient people, such as children and pregnant women. Because without sufficient essential metal stores to prevent heavy metal absorption, these people are especially susceptible to heavy metal toxicity [16,21,50,51]. It should also be noted that Cd and Pb exposure cause the loss of essential metals, which leads to complications such as iron-deficiency anaemia and osteoporosis [52,53]. Appropriate concentrations of essential metal supplementation is therefore also beneficial for preventing these complications....
The article goes on to explain that a vitamin-deprived mother is more susceptible to lead poisoning.
The author of the study at the top openly admits while when looking through the looking glass of statistics this could simply be a cycle of increase over time, but, he cannot conclude through their analysis that the increase was not due to lead in the drinking water. Of course, it was due to the water. It is ridiculous to think otherwise.
The infants conceived and born during the lead poisoning in Flint need to be followed along with their mothers. Any man attempting to conceive a family in Flint but couldn't was due to Flint Water and it's lead content. Lead ingested by men leads to low sperm counts.
