[Vision2020] Leading Cause Of Mental Retardation? Alcohol!

[Andreas Schou]

On 1/30/06, Ted Moffett <starbliss at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Wayne, et. al.
>
> Alcohol has another rather ugly negative health effect apart from cancer,
> a serious issue that seems to be marginalized for various reasons:
>
> Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.
>
> http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/fas/
>
> Considering the encouragement of alcohol use in Moscow (and just about
> everywhere, but especially in a college town, of course) as a drug to
> facilitate the social aspects of sexual partnering, even by those in stable
> relationships, ponder this statement from the CDC website above:
>
> When a pregnant woman drinks alcohol, so does her unborn baby.  There is
> no known safe amount of alcohol to drink while pregnant and there also does
> not appear to be a safe time to drink during pregnancy either.  Therefore,
> it is recommended that women abstain from drinking alcohol at any time
> during pregnancy.  Women who are sexually active and do not use effective
> birth control should also refrain from drinking because they could become
> pregnant and not know for several weeks or more
>

The CDC is scaremongering, while NOFAS appears to be lying outright.

There is, in fact, no evidence that fetal alcohol syndrome occurs after
moderate drinking during pregnancy; it is, in fact, rare even in the
children of alcoholics. Prevalence in the United States varies between .10
per thousand live births (one in ten thousand) and 3.0 per thousand (one in
three hundred). The current prevalence of alcoholism predicts 4.1 million
alcoholic women, or close to thirty-four per thousand. FAS associated with
moderate drinking would predict a number of births with FAS of over
thirty-four per thousand, assuming a relatively flat distribution of
alcoholic women of childbearing age*.

For more (non-hysterical) information on fetal alcohol syndrome, you can
find a relatively well-annotated survey of the information on FAS from this:

http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/FAS/FAS.html

Alternatively, you can pull the same numbers I did from NIH's prevalence
studies. Or you can take a pragmatic historical view: if FAS were tied to
moderate alcohol consumption, you would expect societies with high
individual alcohol consumption -- the ancient Egyptians, Britain throughout
the 1800s -- to have high levels of mental retardation due to FAS. This
appears not to be the case.

-- ACS

* This may be a bad assumption. Actually, I assume that the distribution is
*not*, in fact, flat ... but the point is that, if severe alcoholism were
strictly tied to FAS, you would expect to see every alcoholic mother giving
birth to children with FAS, as well as mothers who consumed moderately
during pregnancy. This is not, in fact, the case.
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