The Damage Done - Old Neil Young Had It Right

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and venture into some rather difficult territory. This is indeed associated with club feet, but only as one of many disabilities, deformities, etc. And I am certain some out there will take exception to what follows, but that's pretty much a given, these days, especially on these here interwebs, as some have taken to calling it.

We live in an increasingly toxic environment (and I'm not just talking red state/blue state here,) and this environment is having an increasing impact on our specie's genetics. Mercury, lead, arsenic, air pollutants, radiation, food pathogens, etc., etc., etc., all have and will continue to impact the incidence and severity of birth defects. Include in this mix poorly tested pharmaceuticals (can anyone say thalidomide?) And biochemicals - herbicides, pesticides, food additives. It's pretty much a chemical soup we live in these days, so it should come as no shock to anyone that there will be mutagenic impacts.

In some ways, this goes back a long time. Industrial manufacturing unleashed a holy hell of toxic products into the human environment (not to even mention the animal environment.) But it was the real acceleration of these processes in the mid-20th Century that made this issue come to the fore, with the impacts of DDT, thalidomide, and many other issues, such as the massive mercury disaster in Japan, the Minimata Disaster in the 1950s, and then later, the Bhopal Disaster of December, 1984.

And, lest we forget, the entire nuclear arms race, starting with the first above-ground tests in New Mexico, and then the hells of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It seems pertinent to mention these last two today, this being the 65th anniversary of Hiroshima's bombing with a nuclear device.

There are no easy-to-find statistics to support any correlation, but I have often wondered what the incidence rate of club feet and other birth defects were in the fifty years after Hiroshima, compared to a similar demographic study of a similar population in the fifty years preceding that same event. Of course, if anyone out there actually has real data on this, I'd love to put it here for all to see. But barring that, we can make at least some estimation of this specific issue by looking at a similar demographic, that of the incidence of specific cancers over similarly comparable time frames. Since the increase of cancer-causing mechanisms fairly well parallels the same rise in mutagenic mechanisms, this is not that difficult a comparison to make. In this article,

Genetic Causes of Adult-Onset Disorders

By: Kira Zhaurova © 2008 Nature Education 

Citation: Zhaurova, K. (2008) Genetic causes of adult-onset disorders. Nature Education 1(1)

 

we see at least one such study to assist in making this point. I am certain there are many others that reach similar conclusions.

And we know now that club feet, at least some percentage, have a clear genetic mutation that is implicated causally. See this article for more info. So it does seem reasonable to ask the question - was the incidence of club feet as a percentage of the birthrate greater before, or after, mid-20th Century?

If anyone has data they'd like to share, to either support or refute this theory, please feel free to Comment, but please provide citations to support your response.