Child-study turmoil leaves bitter taste : Nature News & Comment

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Child-study turmoil leaves bitter taste

Frustration mounts as ambitious US project is scaled back.

Meredith Wadman

16 May 2012

http://www.nature.com/news/child-study-turmoil-leaves-bitter-taste-1.10650

Trisha Massmann got a jolt when she received a letter informing her of

imminent changes to the US National Children's Study (NCS). She had

enthusiastically signed up to the project as an expectant mother in the

summer of 2009, after one of its recruiters knocked on the door of her

blue clapboard house in the farming community of Granite Falls,

Minnesota, population 2,881. By the time Massmann's son, Brett, was born

the following February, two fieldworkers from the NCS --- a hugely

ambitious effort to track environmental and biological influences on the

health of 100,000 US children from before birth to age 21 --- had spent

hours in her home collecting, among other things, dust, air, water and

toenail clippings from the parents to be. The same researchers would

continue to visit and monitor Brett at regular intervals, becoming a

fixture in the family's life.

But in the background, the study has been wracked with budget and

management problems and has become a headache for its overseers at the

US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, land. In March

this year, the disharmony rippled out to Granite Falls, where Massmann's

letter informed her that starting in July, the study's activities,

including family contacts, would be taken over " for an undetermined

period of time " by a research-consulting firm based in North Carolina....