Nov 4, 2009

The NIH-funded National Children’s Study was the focus of an article that appeared today in Nature. The reporter, Meredith Wadman, visited the NCS vanguard center in Duplin County, NC to learn about the study. The Carolina Population Center implements the study in Duplin County and in four other counties in North Carolina. See this website for more information: http://centers.nationalchildrensstudy.gov/unc/Pages/default.aspx.

Children’s study fights to survive (Nature, November 4, 2009).

“Late last month, in a former Blockbuster Video store in tiny Kenansville, North Carolina, an insulated cardboard box awaited a placenta…Many more specimens may soon be coming from rural Duplin County, North Carolina. Over the next several years, investigators in this land of hog farms and cotton fields hope to enrol half the new pregnancies in what is arguably the most ambitious study ever of how the environment affects children’s health.”

CPC Director and Fellow Barbara Entwisle is quoted in the story: “All of the recent science shows the importance of what happens early on in people’s lives for health all the way through their lives,” she says. “This is the future of our country.”

Read the entire story:
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091104/full/462020a.html

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