A professor of pediatrics at Wayne State’s School of Medicine has received a grant of more than $2.8 million from the National Institute of Child Development to investigate damages to neurological development in infants caused by pesticides.
Enrique Ostrea Jr., M.D., of Farmington Hills, said he’s been studying the effect that household pesticides have on infants since 2002.
Pesticides can cause damages to developing brains, such as in communication, movement, hearing/language and hand-eye coordination, according to the WSU School of Medicine.
“The aim is to determine whether the exposure to pesticides, which are neurotoxicants, would always lead to these problems,” Ostrea said.
The research is a continuation of Ostrea’s earlier study that involved a group of children in Malolos, Bulacan, a town in the Philippines where toddlers received environmental pesticide exposure.
“It’s relevant to the world because there’s a widespread use of these types of pesticides,” Ostrea said.
Two of the most common pesticides found in households around the world are propoxur and pyrethroids, and, according to Ostrea, propuxur and pyrethroids are the two most prevalent pesticides that children are exposed to before birth.
Ostrea said his study will pick up where he left off in previous study.
“We’re starting with children four to six now,” Ostrea said. “We originally started them up to two years of age from birth. [We] first detected the amount of exposure or whether they were exposed or not … most problems started at two years of age.”
Ostrea said there has been a reported increase of incidents of illnesses such as attention deficit disorder and mental retardation in the United States.
The ultimate goal of this study is to find out how and why this occurs and to stop the effects pesticides might have.
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