What's Wrong With Public Health Information? Hate Mail

You do have to wonder how many of the people who are upset with the CDC for advocating that women who might become pregnant intentionally or unintentionally, knowingly or unknowingly not drink a poison, alcohol, unless they use contraception are, nonetheless, upset with the situation in Flint Michigan in which a poison, lead, has been ingested through the tap water.

That it is the choice of a individuals in the case of alcohol and the case of criminals in the state government of Michigan and the appointed dictator in Flint doesn't really change the fact that fetuses exposed to either are at risk, in some cases for exactly the same things.

Here's a list of the symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome.

Some of the behavioral and intellectual disabilities of people with FASDs include:
• Difficulty with learning or memory
• Higher than normal level of activity (hyperactivity)
• Difficulty with attention
• Speech and language delays
• Low IQ
• Poor reasoning and judgment skills
People born with FASDs can also have problems with their organs,
including the heart and kidneys.

Here's a list of symptoms of fetal lead poisoning issued to inform pregnant women

Too much lead in your body can:

• Put you at risk of miscarriage
Cause your baby to be born too early or too small
• Hurt your baby’s brain, kidneys, and
 nervous system
• Cause your child to have learning or
 behavior problems 

And those are only some of the risks from being exposed to either of those poisons, there are others, many of them identical.

It is the job of the Center for Disease Control to inform people of known health risks, what they said last week wasn't a call for legislation to make it illegal for women who are fertile to drink.  That's NOT their responsibility.  Apparently some people figure that it's better for people to not be informed of known health risks.    If you want to discuss what ambitious, unscrupulous prosecutors might do with that information in targeting women for the own political advancement, yes, that's a big problem, a big overreach in many of the known cases but that's still no reason for the CDC to not issue health advice on the basis of known risks.  That's their job, it would be unethical and immoral for them to suppress that information.

The politicization of pregnancy in the career advancement of prosecutors, that's another issue, entirely, a question of politics, not of public health.