Tortillas made with corn containing a toxic mold may have been responsible for a rash of serious birth defects in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas during the early 1990s, says a report in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
 
For more than a decade, scientists have been trying to determine the cause of the surge of infants born with damaged or missing brains. No chemical links to the affected babies were ever proven.
 
Researchers now say they have human studies linking a toxin (fumonisin) in corn mold with neural tube defects in newborns, the Associated Press reported.
 
There were high concentrations of this toxin in the corn harvest just before the outbreak of birth defects in the Rio Grande Valley, where tortillas are a dietary staple.
 

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