Title: “Safe” Levels Of Arsenic In Drinking Water Have Negative Health Effects on Pregnant/Lactating Mothers And Offspring, Scientists Find
Headings: “Safe” Levels Of Arsenic In Drinking Water Have Negative Health Effects on Pregnant/Lactating Mothers And Offspring, Scientists Find
“Safe” Levels Of Arsenic In Drinking Water Have Negative Health Effects on Pregnant/Lactating Mothers And Offspring, Scientists Find
June 1, 2012 by

Content: Pregnant and/or breastfeeding mothers who consumed low levels (10 ppb) of arsenic in their drinking water, the scientists found, exhibited significant disruption in their lipid metabolism, leading to diminished nutrients in their blood and in their breast milk. As a result, their offspring showed significant growth and development deficits during the postnatal period before weaning. Birth outcomes such as litter size and length of gestation were unaffected. “The pups were essentially malnourished; they were small and underdeveloped,” Hamilton says. Once the pups were switched to milk from a mother who had not consumed arsenic, their growth deficits reversed, although only the males fully caught up with the pups that had had no arsenic exposure. The U.S. EPA recently lowered the Maximum Contaminant Level for arsenic to 10 ppb in public water supplies—a regulated level that is considered “safe” for a lifetime of exposure—yet concentrations of 100 ppb and higher are commonly found in private, unregulated well water in regions where arsenic is geologically abundant, including upper New England (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine), Florida, and large parts of the Upper Midwest, the Southwest, and the Rocky Mountains. “This study raises a couple of issues. First, we have to think again about whether 10 ppb arsenic as a U.S. drinking water standard is safe and protective of human health,” says Hamilton, who is the MBL’s chief academic and scientific officer and a senior scientist in the MBL Bay Paul Center. “Second, this study reiterates an emerging idea in toxicology that pregnant women and their offspring are uniquely sensitive to chemicals in their environment,” Hamilton says. “