In 2014, the town of Flint began using the Flint River as a public water source, resulting in unsafe levels of lead, bacteria and other contaminants in residents’ drinking water.
The study found that children born to Flint mothers exposed to unclean drinking water during pregnancy had lower birth weights on average than children born to mothers living in cities with clean water during the same period of time.
The effects were particularly pronounced in children born to mothers from a lower socioeconomic status.
Conducted in collaboration with colleagues from Tulane University and Wuhan University, the research was published through the IZA Institute of Labor Economics in January.
“There are very convincing studies showing that people with lower birth weight have poorer performance in school and lower labor market wages, and they die earlier.” Birth weight trends have even been linked to crime rates, Chen said, so looking at the birth weights of infants born in a particular region can help researchers predict the long-term effects of water pollutants on social and financial outcomes for the population of that region.
While lead is one of the main contaminants found in Flint’s drinking water, bacterial contamination of the water supply also poses a significant threat to residents of Flint and many other areas in the United States.
Bacteria is usually flushed out of drinking water with a cocktail of disinfectants added to water supply pipes.
In many regions experiencing clean water shortages, psychosocial interventions may also be necessary to reduce maternal stress during pregnancy, which is known to have adverse consequences for infants.
She and her colleagues had no way to determine which mothers had engaged in avoidance behaviors and which had not, meaning that some infants included in the sample were likely born to mothers who had avoided drinking from contaminated public water supplies.
If this is the case, she explained, the results of the study may underestimate the effects of a mother’s consumption of contaminated water on an infant in utero.