Investigators still aren’t sure what’s causing a cluster of birth defects in central Washington, where the rate is four times the national average. Health officials met Monday to figure out what to do next.
A new public service announcement is one way health officials are trying to teach women about folic acid. It's also available in Spanish.
One of the birth defects folic acid helps prevent is anencephaly, which results in unformed skulls in babies.
Pesticide exposure or nitrates in well water were suspected causes of the birth defect. Epidemiologists have recently ruled that out.
Now, officials will re-interview women who had affected pregnancies in the last two years.
They’ll use a questionnaire from a national study on birth defects. Those questions will help compare data collected in Washington to other states.
They hope this data will help narrow down the causes of anencephaly. They’ll release the data in July 2015.
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