It’s quite rare for a baby to be born with his or her intestines exposed to the hospital-room air, a birth defect referred to as gastroschisis.
So it came as a shock when public health officials in Washoe County – home of Reno, America’s Biggest Little City – noticed that babies born in the county were 10 times more likely to have the condition than babies born in any of the previous 10 years or so.
Dr. Leslie Elliott, then a public health official in Washoe County, was soon on the case, delivering a hefty questionnaire to the 14 women who had babies with the condition and 56 of their peers who had healthy babies.
Other epidemiologists weighed in, and posed a wide variety of questions. Had the women eaten foods from other countries? Drank unpasteurized milk? Been exposed to certain pesticides?
After analyzing the results, one thing stood out. A significant proportion of the women had had a cold or cough and had taken medicine to take care of it, Elliott said. Others had, at some point in the past, used methamphetamine or other recreational drugs.
The apparent answer, though, doesn’t fully satisfy Elliott. After all, women get colds and take drugs in every corner of America, yet the rest of the country is not reporting clusters of gastroschisis (pronounced gastro-SKI-sis). “It’s really difficult to settle in that one of these risk factors could really be the answer to a cluster,” Elliott, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Reno said in an interview with California Watch.
Elliott said she will be taking a closer look at the phenomenon – which subsided after the 12-month spike in cases of the defect. For now, the defect is not causing long-term trauma, as doctors are skilled at detecting it in the womb and bringing a team of surgeons to the delivery room to attend to the babies.
Reno, though, is not alone. A gradual increase in cases of the defect is being seen worldwide – not excluding California. A UC San Francisco study found that instances of the defect had tripled in the Golden State from 1987 to 2003. Those researchers suggest future studies “to better examine the potential role of environmental factors.” Because they, too, admit that it’s not clear why this problem is on the rise.
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