Countywide : $265,000 OKd for ‘Drug Baby’ Project

Supervisors on Tuesday approved without comment $265,060 in federal funding for Orange County’s first comprehensive program to treat and study children born to mothers who abused drugs during pregnancy.

The program, in operation a little more than a year at UCI Medical Center in Orange, has been monitoring the health and behavior of 60 drug-exposed children, offering them checkups and teaching their mothers or foster parents how to care for them.

Around the nation, estimates of so-called “drug babies” vary widely, with different studies reporting from 13,000 to 375,000 such children born last year.

In Orange County last year, hospital directors and nursing managers estimated that 1,248 Orange County children were exposed to marijuana, heroin, amphetamines and other illicit drugs at birth, but many health experts believe the problem here is greater.

A memo from the County Health Care Agency to supervisors described the problem here as alarming. For instance, 20% of all protective custody cases involve infants exposed to drugs or parents involved with drugs, it said, and county juvenile detention memos from January, 1988, to May, 1989, showed that 270 newborns tested positive for drugs.

Len Foster, the County Health Care Agency’s division manager for adult and child health services, called the UCI project a start at tackling an important problem.

The federal grant allocated by the supervisors covers UCI’s care to drug-exposed children from March to September of this year. Cheryl Milford, developmental psychologist at UCI and a founder of the project, and the project’s pediatrician, Lynn Hunt, said they plan to expand their program to monitor and treat 400 drug-exposed children to age 5.