Radiation released into the atmosphere by the Fukushima, Japan nuclear accident has begun taking a human toll via newborn babies. A cluster of severe genetic birth defects, 4 times the national average, has emerged in a 3 county area around Yakima, Washington on the US west coast. Local Doctors are “stunned” and cannot find a reason for cluster of deformed babies; others know it is from Fukushima Radiation which saturated Washington in March, 2011. This will get worse. Much worse.
Babies in a 3 county area near Yakima Washington are being born without parts of their brain or skull (anencephaly), another birth defect in which the neural tube, which forms the brain and spine, fails to close properly (spina bifida) and a sac-like protrusion of the brain through the front or back of the skull (encephalocele) . As of 14 months ago, by 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.
Health officials originally were alerted to the problem by a nurse, Sara Barron, 58, who was in charge of infection control and quality assurance at Prosser Memorial Hospital, a 25-bed medical center in the farm town set on the Yakima River. A 30-year nursing veteran, she’d seen perhaps one or two devastating cases of anencephaly in her wide-ranging career.
“And now I was sitting at Prosser, with 30 deliveries a month and there’s two cases in a six-month period,” Barron said. “Then, I was talking to another doctor about it and she has a third one coming. My teeth dropped. It was like, ‘Oh my god.’”
At a regional medical meeting, there were more anecdotal reports. So Barron notified state health officials, who started looking into the problem.
“This is bizarre,” Barron said. “This is a very, very small area.”
Investigators pored over medical records of the 27 area women with affected pregnancies and 108 matched controls who received care at the same 13 prenatal clinics, Stahre said. They examined where the women worked, what diseases they had, whether they smoked or drank alcohol, what kind of medications they took and other factors. They looked at where they lived and whether they got their water from a public source or a private well. They looked at race and whether the problem was more pronounced in the area’s migrant farm workers or in other residents.
In the end, there was nothing — “no common exposures, conditions or causes,” state officials said — to explain the spike.
NO ONE CHECKED FOR RADIATION
Of all the testing, of all the research, no one bothered to look at what some see as the most-obvious cause: radiation from the Fukushima, Japan Nuclear Disaster site.
In March, 2011, an earthquake off the coast of Japan caused a tsunami which enveloped the Fukushima nuclear power plant and overwhelmed its sea wall. The water shorted-out all electricity, stopping the pumps that provide water to cool the reactor cores. Of the six reactors at Fukushima, Four melted down, three of those exploding in the process.
Comments
It was known several years ago when there was a spike in infant deaths in the PNW. So add that to the birth defects and there is a real problem.