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Rise in Brain Birth Defect in Washington State

posted by girlwhowaspluggedout on Monday March 03 2014, @09:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the some-correlation-is-still-better-than-none dept.

GungnirSniper writes:

"In the US State of Washington, the rare birth defect anencephaly has become slightly more common, worrying would-be parents and baffling epidemiologists. TechTimes.com reports that the health records of a single three-county area in Washington State 'revealed 23 cases of anencephaly in 36 months, between January 2010 and 2013. This translates to a rate of 8.4 births out of every 10,000. That is four times the normal occurrence for the rare disorder.'

A group of epidemiologists working for the state's Department of Health reported finding no clear cause for the exceptional prevalence of this fatal birth defect. But they are now accused of not looking hard enough for the cause. Dr. Beate Ritz, who has done several studies on birth defects, told CNN that the data quality on medical records, which were the primary source of data used in the study, 'is so low that it's not really research'.

Washington's Department of Health has admitted that 'Medical record reviews might not have captured all information, preventing a cause from being identified,' and says its officials will continue monitoring births, and look for possible causes.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by fadrian on Monday March 03 2014, @12:24PM

    by fadrian (3194) on Monday March 03 2014, @12:24PM (#10101)

    First of all, we're only talking three cases here - individually devastating, but statistically, given the small sample size, talking about X per 10K or Y per M doesn't really make a lot of sense, since over the next few years, the samples will probably revert back to the mean.

    Second, if these happened (say) in Seattle, Yakima, and Vancouver, there might not be a "common cause", as these cities are separated by hundreds of miles. Even if they did all happen in one area, you'd have a pretty good chance that this is random and not correlated by anything other than the time of occurrence.

    What you have here is almost certainly a statistical anomaly, not an epidemic. And this is what happens when you have doctors and reporters (who know so, so little about statistics) trying to make sense of random chance.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by hemocyanin on Monday March 03 2014, @01:30PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Monday March 03 2014, @01:30PM (#10127)

    Three cases?

    Twenty-three pregnancies were affected by anencephaly ... The anencephaly rate was 8.4 per 10,000 live births (95% confidence interval [CI] = 4.5-12.0), compared with a national estimate of 2.1 per 10,000 live births (CI = 1.9-2.2)

    http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6235a5. htm [cdc.gov]

    In that same CDC summary none of the counties are enumerated. Take a look, they aren't there.

    After some googling, it turns out that we're talking Yakima, Benton, and Franklin counties. http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2014/02/22/2843413/b irth-defect-in-benton-franklin.html [tri-cityherald.com] This particular area of Washington state gets inundated with pesticides and the rates amongst hispanic peoples is higher (see link above). And of course, the Hanford site is smack dab in the middle.

    Map showing counties:
    http://www.coilgun.info/rover_wa/images/washington -county-map-large.png [coilgun.info]

    Hanford reservation is a huge block of that (shaded gray), just east of dead center:
    https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hanford+Site/@46 .5124226,-119.4993278,10z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s 0x54985a3722b17805:0x350eb8746e4035a7 [google.com]

    If it does have anything to do with Hanford, you could be certain the CDC would be under pressure to not figure that out, and rolling downhill, state health officials as well. With reports on the study being extra crappy ( http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/01/health/cohen-birth-d efects/ [cnn.com] ), well, it is reasonable to wonder why.