http://www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-h...experts-n24986
Yakima, Benton and Franklin counties:
http://www.yakimaherald.com/home/132...r-birth-defect
Can't help but wonder about the proximity to Hanford:
A Hanford whistle blower was just fired:
http://www.yakimaherald.com/news/lat...d-nuclear-site
By JoNel Aleccia
A mysterious cluster of severe birth defects in rural Washington state is confounding health experts, who say they can find no cause, even as reports of new cases continue to climb.
Federal and state officials won?t say how many women in a three-county area near Yakima, Wash., have had babies with anencephaly, a heart-breaking condition in which they?re born missing parts of the brain or skull. And they admit they haven't interviewed any of the women in question, or told the mothers there's a potentially widespread problem.
But as of January 2013, officials with the Washington state health department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had counted nearly two dozen cases in three years, a rate four times the national average.
Since then, one local genetic counselor, Susie Ball of the Central Washington Genetics Program at Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital, says she has reported ?eight or nine? additional cases of anencephaly and spina bifida, another birth defect in which the neural tube, which forms the brain and spine, fails to close properly.
?It does strike me as a lot,? says Ball...
A mysterious cluster of severe birth defects in rural Washington state is confounding health experts, who say they can find no cause, even as reports of new cases continue to climb.
Federal and state officials won?t say how many women in a three-county area near Yakima, Wash., have had babies with anencephaly, a heart-breaking condition in which they?re born missing parts of the brain or skull. And they admit they haven't interviewed any of the women in question, or told the mothers there's a potentially widespread problem.
But as of January 2013, officials with the Washington state health department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had counted nearly two dozen cases in three years, a rate four times the national average.
Since then, one local genetic counselor, Susie Ball of the Central Washington Genetics Program at Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital, says she has reported ?eight or nine? additional cases of anencephaly and spina bifida, another birth defect in which the neural tube, which forms the brain and spine, fails to close properly.
?It does strike me as a lot,? says Ball...
http://www.yakimaherald.com/home/132...r-birth-defect
Can't help but wonder about the proximity to Hanford:
A Hanford whistle blower was just fired:
http://www.yakimaherald.com/news/lat...d-nuclear-site
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