Reproductive outcomes among former Love Canal residents, Niagara Falls, New York☆
Highlights
► We studied birth outcomes of women who lived near the Love Canal waste site. ► Women had elevated risk of delivering a preterm infant while living near the Canal. ► The ratio of male to female births was lower for children conceived near the Canal. ► The frequency of birth defects was greater than expected among boys born 1983–1996. ► Women exposed as children had an increased risk of a LBW infant before relocation.
Introduction
The Love Canal was a rectangular 16-acre, 10-foot deep landfill situated in a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, a city within Niagara County located in western New York State (NYS). The trench, dug and abandoned in the 1890s, became a dumping pit for the Hooker Chemical Company from 1942 through 1953 when approximately 21,800 tons of at least 200 different chemicals including pesticides, chlorinated solvents, and naphthalenes were deposited (New York State Department of Health, 1981). In 1954, an elementary school was built on the edge of the soil covered dump, and by 1972, a community of houses bordered the landfill (New York State Department of Health, 1981). Environmental sampling in homes near the landfill in 1978 detected numerous volatile organic chemicals in basement air, which suggested a health threat (Kim et al., 1982, New York State Department of Health, 1981). Between 1978 and 1980, several state and federal actions led to the relocation of families living next to the Canal and later to voluntary relocations of families from their homes farther from the Canal, with the eventual establishment of the Emergency Declaration Area (EDA, see Fig. 1) (New York State Department of Health, 1981, New York State Department of Health, 1986).
Several studies of reproductive outcomes among former residents were conducted and reported in the early 1980s. Two studies found no excess of low birth weight (LBW) infants in the Love Canal group when compared to an external control group, but both demonstrated an excess of LBW infants born to owners of “wet” homes versus owners of “dry” homes (Goldman et al., 1985, Vianna and Polan, 1984). These studies were limited by the imprecise nature of the exposure metric, which assumed that swales and other “wet” areas were conduits for the transport of hazardous chemicals. Two other studies reported elevated rates of congenital malformations (Goldman et al., 1985, Paigen, 1982), but these studies were limited by self-selection and self-report. No study has investigated reproductive outcomes among former Love Canal residents after relocation.
The NYS Department of Health, advised by a committee of experts in epidemiology, biostatistics, toxicology, engineering, and other relevant disciplines, in addition to community members, conducted a comprehensive, observational study to describe the exposure and health status of former Love Canal residents through 1996. A previous article described analysis of archived sera that was collected when the residents still lived near the Canal; three chemicals (1,2,4-trichlorobenzene, beta-hexachlorocyclohexane, and 1,2-dichlorobenzene) of the eight analyzed were detectable in most of the participants. Further examination of the three detected chemicals demonstrated that persons who resided closest to the Canal had elevated levels of 1,2,4-trichlorobenzene and 1,2-dichlorobenzene compared to persons who lived farther away (Kielb et al., 2010). The objective of this article is to expand the focus by describing the long term reproductive outcomes of women who lived at Love Canal. It complements other articles about mortality (Gensburg et al., 2009a) and cancer incidence (Gensburg et al., 2009b) in this population.
This study was designed to evaluate whether maternal exposure to chemicals arising from Love Canal was associated with an elevated risk of bearing a child with an adverse reproductive outcome or a higher than expected proportion of male births. Unlike previous studies, which only investigated reproductive effects while the mother was still living at the Canal, this study evaluated whether any such effects were persistent by following the women through 1996, 16–18 years after the end of residential exposure. The study is also unique in that it used two complementary approaches: (1) comparing outcomes of former residents with those of other women in Upstate New York State and Niagara County; and (2) comparing outcomes among former residents according to measures of potential exposure such as location and time period of residence.
Section snippets
Study population
The study population consisted of identified infants live born to women of the follow-up health study cohort. The cohort included persons who resided in the EDA between 1940 and June 1978 and were interviewed between 1978 and 1982 in conjunction with health studies conducted at that time by the NYS Department of Health, or, if under 18 years of age, were children whose parents were interviewed. Names of women who would have been between 12 and 55 years of age from 1960 through 1996 were
Study population
The full Love Canal cohort included 3215 women, 44 of whom were excluded because they were 55 years old before 1960. The names of the remaining 3171 women were matched to the NYS Vital Records, and 980 of them were identified as mothers of 1799 live births from 1960 through 1996. A total of 1767 of these births were singleton and 32 were multiple gestations. Among singleton births, the mean birth weight was 3363 g, the median birth weight was 3317 g, and the minimum and maximum birth weights were
Discussion
The results indicate a statistically significant elevated risk of preterm birth among children born on the Love Canal prior to the time of relocation, using NYS as the standard population. The frequency of congenital malformations was greater than expected among Love Canal boys born from 1983 to 1996, although the 95% CI included the null value. Consistent with the results of the SIR analyses, the GEE modeling also suggests that the infants born or conceived in the EDA may have been more likely
Conclusions
This study was conducted to assess the reproductive experiences of women who resided near Love Canal, one of the first recognized and most seriously contaminated hazardous waste sites in the United States. The results showed a statistically significant elevated risk of preterm birth among children born on the Love Canal prior to relocation, using NYS as the standard population. Additionally, the ratio of male to female births was lower for children conceived in the EDA prior to the relocation
Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the Expert Advisory Committee, composed of environmental and public health experts and community members, for their guidance in conducting this study. The authors also acknowledge Dr. Ying Wang from the NYS Congenital Malformations Registry for providing and assisting with the malformations aspect of this reproductive study and Lani Rafferty from NYS Department of Health Wadsworth Laboratories for her technical expertise in assisting with development of the residential
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Financial support was provided, in part, by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, with funds from the final settlement between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Occidental Chemical Company (formerly Hooker Chemicals and Plastics Corporation), and by the New York State Department of Health.
The New York State Department of Health Institutional Review Board approved this study as part of the larger Love Canal Follow-up Health Study at a full board meeting in August 1996 and annually thereafter.