3 babies/3 birth defects/chemical pesticides involved?

[scarletlib]

Here is an interesting story on many levels that was first published on March 13, 2005 in the Palm Beach Post. There is a followup story this week.
Three sets of migrant worker families working the fields in a small county in Florida called Immokalee all had babies born with severe birth defects and all within a few months of each other. An investigation is now under way to see if the pesticides and/or other chemicals applied to the fields the parents work in are possibly to blame.

Due to the fact the families were poor and uneducated there was no extensive prenatal care. All the babies were born and the parents shocked at birth. Reminded me initially of the thalidomide babies born in the 60's.

"IMMOKALEE — Carlos Candelario, known as Carlitos, was born Dec. 17 without arms or legs.

On Feb. 4, Jesus Navarrete, whose parents live about 100 feet away from Carlitos' family, was born with Pierre Robin syndrome. His jaw is underdeveloped, and that causes his tongue to fall into his throat, and he risks choking.

Two days later, on Feb. 6, Maria Meza gave birth to a child missing its nose, an ear and with no visible sexual organs. At first the child was given the name Jorge, but hours later was renamed Violeta after a more detailed examination determined that the baby was a girl. She died three days later of massive birth defects."

"Meza now lives about a mile away, but in 2004, when they became pregnant, all three mothers lived within 200 feet of one another at the same migrant labor camp, called Tower Cabins. All of them are Mexicans and worked for the same produce company, picking tomatoes, in the same field just off Camp Keais Road in Immokalee. More than two dozen different pesticides and herbicides are used in that field."

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/news/spe... /

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_ne...

[Lexingtonian]

1. generally hard to say

First of all, neither link you post works....

Almost as important is that all these infants were born in a pretty narrow time window. The defects also suggest problems generated at nearly the same times in development- day 25 to day 40 at the outer limits. Which is when 'morning' sickness is most severe, for which these women may have taken some kind of homemade concoction with the effect.
The defects described are pretty extreme- however, the most damaged embryos and foeti are not seen because of spontaneous abortions or stillbirths.

Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans are a problematic population when dealing with birth defects, having relatively high rates- spina bifida, cleft lip/palate kinds notably. Different domesticates of Mexican vegetables with large amounts of pigments, e.g. jalapeno peppers, have varying amounts of substances that are probably insecticides by evolution but have teratogenic effects on humans. I don't think any thorough research has been done on it, but the correlation is know and studied somewhat in e.g. south Texas where hospitals have to deal with the relatively large number of affected infants. Telling Latina women, many of them illegals and unable to supply themselves with anything else, to stop eating what they have all their lives without certainty of what to forbid, and that whenever they just might have gotten pregnant but aren't sure of it...it's sad, but not much can be done without better scientific research and reorganization of the whole illegal labor scheme.

It's doubtful any of the known and legal herbicides or pesticides are individually responsible for this; maybe there's a bad batch there contaminated with some other chemical, or some actual thalidomide or similar drug was brought in from Latin America (it's sold in pharmacies there, for treatment of leprosy and AIDS symptoms) and they unknowingly took some.