By Judy Hoy, Stevensville
At their next meeting, the Ravalli County Board of Health will discuss the significant increase in birth defects on human babies and other young animals. They will also hopefully discuss what might be done to find the cause. The meeting will be held on December 9, 2015 at 3:00 p.m. in the meeting room on the second floor of the County Administration Building, 215 S. 4th Street, Hamilton, MT. If you can’t attend, you can make your wishes known by sending an email to commissioners@rc.mt.gov.
Everyone might want to encourage the BOH to address ways to find what is causing the increase in birth defects. One suggestion for discussion is asking the EPA to do testing of the air, snow, rain, surface water, foliage and other testable factors to determine what environmental toxins are present in bio-significant amounts.
In the last 10 years, heart defects have become the number one birth defect on human newborns. Another developmental problem for children is autism. If autism continues to increase at the current rate, in another 10 years, one of every two children born will have autism.
Hopefully, by finding and stopping the use of what is causing the birth defects on children, we can stop the destructive impairment of developing young of all vertebrate species.
For consideration by those to which only the economy is of importance, the birth defects are costing many billions of dollars in health care. This is in addition to lost revenue to businesses as a result of loss of the young of domestic animals and declining populations of wildlife. It should not be necessary to point out how terribly unkind and extremely inhumane the birth defects are.
Thank you for your concern and to the Board of Health for addressing this important issue.