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 Arsenic is one of the most common elements in the Earth's crust and
a natural contaminant in water in many regions of the world. While
previous research has found high levels of arsenic in the water
associated with a variety of birth complications in places like
China, Argentina and Bangladesh, less is known about what happens to
babies in places where pregnant women drink water with small amounts
of arsenic.
For the current study, researchers examined data on 428,804 births
in Ohio from 2006 to 2008 to see how birth outcomes differed based
on county-level arsenic exposure in the water. Because up to 80
percent of homes in some counties had private well water - for which
arsenic data wasn’t available - researchers restricted their
analysis to counties where less than 10 percent or 20 percent of
homes used well water.
In counties where less than 10 percent of the population used
private wells, arsenic in public drinking water was associated with
14 percent higher odds of very low birth weight babies and 10
percent higher odds of premature deliveries, researchers report in
Environmental Research.
"Arsenic contamination varies geographically, based on underlying
geology," said lead study author Kirsten Almberg, a public health
researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
"Testing your drinking water for a variety of contaminants including
arsenic and lead is sound advice," Almberg said by email.
The study found negative birth outcomes even when women lived in
counties where tap water might expose them to arsenic levels below
10 micrograms per liter (10 ug/L), the maximum amount considered
safe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Almberg
noted. This suggests EPA regulations may not protect women from
reproductive problems linked to arsenic, she said.
The study didn't find an association between higher use of tap water
at the county level and a risk of very premature infants or infants
being small for their gestational age but not very low birth weight.
Drinking water with arsenic did appear linked to a higher risk of
low birth weight babies, but the added risk was too small to rule
out the possibility that it was due to chance.
The study wasn't a controlled experiment designed to prove whether
or how specific levels of arsenic in drinking water might lead to
negative birth outcomes.
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Other limitations include incomplete or missing arsenic measurements
for certain counties at certain points of time during the study, as
well as the possibility that pregnant women drank water from sources
that weren't measured in the study.
"The disadvantage is that we don't know exactly how much of the
arsenic-tainted water the mothers were consuming, so the study
simply assumes an overall average for each county," said Philippe
Grandjean, chair of environmental medicine at the University of
Southern Denmark in Odense.
"This means that it is not possible to explore whether greater
adverse effects were seen in births where the mother had consumed
much public water, as compared with mothers who preferred bottled
water," Grandjean, who wasn't involved in the study, said by email.
"Overall, this imprecision means that the study probably
underestimated the adverse effects, and that arsenic is more toxic
to the baby than the authors calculated."
Women who are worried about arsenic exposure during pregnancy should
get their water tested if they use a private well, said Xindi Hu of
the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. Municipal
water supplies should already get routine testing.
They can also take a folate supplement because this can potentially
reduce the toxicity of arsenic during pregnancy, Hu, who wasn't
involved in the study, said by email.
"I won't suggest drinking only bottled water because it should be
just a short-term emergency response, not a long-term solution," Hu
said. "What is even more severe, bottled water is not necessarily
cleaner or safer than tap water."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2sYSTdU Environmental Research, online May 15,
2017.
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