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Pregnant? H2O Concerns
Published in METRO •METRO Story •news_you_can_use | 0 Comments, Talk about this article »
When you’re pregnant, you worry about anything that could potentially affect your baby’s health. So if you saw the news reports last summer about the study linking chlorinated drinking water to birth defects, your worry level may have skyrocketed.
Conducted by researchers at the University of Taiwan and the University of Birmingham, UK, the study was based on a statistical analysis of nearly 400,000 infants in Taiwan. It concluded that exposure to the chemical by-products of chlorination, called trihalomethanes, increased the risk of three serious birth defects: holes in the heart, cleft palate, and anencephalus (where neural development fails, resulting in the absence of a major portion of the brain, skull, and scalp).
But there’s no cause for alarm, say experts at the British National Health Service. These birth defects are rare—just four cases of heart defects were detected among the 400,000 infants whose mothers were exposed to the highest levels of toxins. Since the researchers didn’t take into account other factors, such as the mothers’ nutritional health, whether they smoked or drank alcohol, or their genetic or environmental factors, it’s impossible to know what role the chlorine by-products may have played.
What’s more, the United States and Taiwan disinfect water differently, so you can’t assume that a similar study conducted here would get the same results, says study author Jouni Jaakkola, MD, DSc, PhD, director of the Institute for Occupational Health, University of Birmingham, UK. Rest assured: “The estimated risk increases are small, and the benefits of water chlorination far outweigh the risks,” says Jaakkola.
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