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UC Berkeley Study Finds In Utero Arsenic Exposure From Drinking ...

...The risk of dying due to bronchiectasis, usually a rare lung disease, is 46 times higher than normal if the child's mother also drank the arsenic-contaminated water while pregnant, according to the study.

These findings provide some of the first human evidence that fetal or early childhood exposure to any toxic substance can result in markedly increased disease rates in adults.

"The extraordinary risk we found for in utero and early childhood exposure is a new scientific finding," says the study's lead author, Allan Smith, professor of epidemiology at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health.

"I sometimes ponder the improbability that drinking water with concentrations of arsenic less than one-thousandth of a gram per liter could do this, and think that I've got to be wrong.

But our years of working with arsenic exposure in India and Chile tie in with this study perfectly." The paper will appear in the July print issue of Environmental Health Perspectives and is already posted on its Web site.

Classified as a semi-metal, the element arsenic is one of the most potent cancer-causing agents known.

Skin, bladder and A recent study by Smith showed that adults exposed to arsenic can also develop decreased lung function similar ...