Contaminated corn may have caused an increase in babies born with rare birth defects in the Rio Grande Valley in the early 1990s, according to a new study.
HARLINGEN, Texas — Contaminated corn may have caused an increase in babies born with rare birth defects in the Rio Grande Valley in the early 1990s, according to a new study.
Scientists have been searching more than a decade for the cause of a surge in babies in the region with neural tube defects, abnormalities of the brain and spinal cord that arise in the first weeks of pregnancy.
In one south Texas county, there were six cases in six weeks of babies born with rudimentary or missing brains. Overall, a high rate of neural tube defects was found among almost all border counties.
Residents and lawyers had blamed pollution, and General Motors and other U.S.-owned factories paid $17 million without admitting wrongdoing to settle a lawsuit accusing their border factories of poisoning the air.
But no chemical links to the disease were ever proven, and Texas health officials began suspecting fumonisin, a toxin in corn mold. Experts had noted a high concentration in the corn harvest just before the outbreak. Some Texas horses died from brain disease caused by the toxin.
According to the February issue of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers now have a study that looks at the relationship between tortilla consumption, fumonisin and neural tube defects. Laboratory data have pointed to a link, but until now, researchers have lacked human studies.
The study found that pregnant women who ate 300 to 400 tortillas a month during the first trimester had more than twice the risk of giving birth to babies with the defects than did women who ate fewer than 100 tortillas.
Blood samples indicated that the higher the level of fumonisin, the greater the risk of neural tube defects.
Tortillas are an inexpensive dietary staple along the Texas-Mexico border, and studies suggest that the average young Mexican-American woman along the border eats 110 a month.
"I don't know that we can ever go back and definitely say that it was fumonisin," said Lucina Suarez, director of epidemiology and disease surveillance for the Texas Department of State Health Services. But given this and other research, she said, "It certainly looks that way."
David Miller of Carleton University in Canada, one of the world's experts on the toxin, said there was still no direct human evidence that the toxin caused the birth defects.
He said more study was needed because the mold can still taint the corn supply and many diets are largely made up of corn tortillas.
"We need to know the answer to this question," he said.
Ron Riley, a fumonisin expert with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said there appeared to be some connection between tortilla consumption and neural tube defects, but more study was needed.
Source: Associated Press
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