Alaskan Teaches Students How Alcohol, Pregnancy Don’t Mix

Where the mouse should have a paw, it has a flipper, with fused bones instead of toes. Where the mouse should have an eyeball, it has no orb, only a tiny hole in its skull.

Stephen Jacquier’s high school science students perform caesarean sections on pregnant lab mice that have been force-fed alcohol. As the students dissect the amniotic sacs, they get a startling view of how booze can affect the unborn.

“We may also see the brain sticking out of the top of the head,” Jacquier says. “You may also see limbs missing.”

An itinerant teacher who moves from school to school in some of western Alaska’s remote villages, Jacquier blends science, math and English lessons with a social issue of particular relevance to Alaskans: the devastating effects of fetal alcohol syndrome.

“It’s something that’s practical,” Jacquier says. “It’s something that matters.”

It matters especially to Diane Worley, the state’s fetal alcohol syndrome coordinator. Her job is to change Alaskans’ attitude toward drinking and pregnancy. One of her strategies is to reach school-age children through teachers such as Jacquier.

“His project is a perfect example of how we should merge our sex education with our drug prevention classes,” Worley says.

Fetal alcohol syndrome can cause neurological damage, stunted growth and physical abnormalities. It is the leading cause of mental retardation. The brain damage shows up in memory and cause-and-effect reasoning. People with the ailment often cannot understand time, abstract concepts or generalizations.

Alaska has the highest rate of fetal alcohol syndrome in the nation. The nation’s rate is 0.67 to 1.0 cases per 1,000 live births; Alaska’s rate is estimated at 1 to 1.4 cases per 1,000 births.

Add the Alaskans who have other alcohol-related birth defects, which do not produce facial distortions and therefore can be more difficult to detect than fetal alcohol syndrome, and the number is multiplied by 10: as many as 14 babies harmed for every 1,000 born, Worley said.

Fetal alcohol syndrome is 100% preventable if women abstain from drinking after conception.

Worley has a powerful new weapon for her cause: a federal grant that will send Alaska $5.8 million a year for five years to address the syndrome.

The state Department of Health and Social Services convened a panel of 20 people to decide how to spend the grant, and its verdict was to fight fetal alcohol syndrome through existing systems, splitting the money 50-50 on prevention and dealing with its victims.

That means widespread training: for social workers to educate women most likely to drink while pregnant; for doctors to inform patients that no amount of alcohol is safe during pregnancy; for job counselors to realize that adults with fetal alcohol syndrome need more job structure than average applicants; for judges to recognize that misdemeanor offenders with the syndrome may not properly grasp concepts of personal property or right and wrong.

It also means somehow convincing children that alcohol and pregnancy don’t mix--and using something more effective than a lecture and a poster hung on a school wall.

That’s where Jacquier comes in.

He teaches in the Southwest Region School District, which includes schools in nine villages some 300 miles southwest of Anchorage: Manokotak, Aleknagik, Charles Point, Ekwok, Koliganek, Portage Creek, New Stuyahok, Togiak and Twin Hills. He instructs classes in each village for about 12 weeks, then moves on.

Jacquier says he lets students draw their own conclusions when they see damaged mice pups under a dissecting microscope.

“I don’t ask the kids to take it on faith,” says Jacquier, a doctoral candidate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in Northern studies, a program focusing on social and cultural issues of the circumpolar north. He was interviewed at the 2000 Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Summit in Anchorage in November.

Jacquier says his experiments are conducted under protocol approved by the university’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, and he always seeks approval of local elders when teaching in Native communities.

Mice have 20-day gestation periods. On the ninth day of pregnancy, Jacquier’s students gently place feeding tubes down the throats of the experimental mice and inject a small amount of solution that is 80% water and 20% high-proof grain alcohol.

Most experiments also involve an equal number of “control” mice, which are fed a sugar solution with the same number of calories as the alcohol mix.

The mice are given enough booze to produce a .20 blood alcohol level, intended to replicate one binge during a human pregnancy, he says.

“It doesn’t take very much to affect various processes along the way,” Jacquier says.

Within minutes, the rodents’ gross motor skills are affected. They stumble, repeatedly fall off the edge of a box, allow themselves to be turned onto their backs and, finally, pass out.

In the palm of his hand, Jacquier displays one unconscious, spread-eagled mouse and makes a point about what can happen to teens at a party.

“Ugly things can happen,” he tells the students. “You don’t want to be in this condition.”

Nineteen days into the pregnancies, Jacquier kills the mice and the students perform caesarean sections.

From each dissected mouse comes a chain of amniotic sacs, eight on average and each containing a fetus. The mice that were force-fed alcohol have baby mice commonly half the size of fetuses taken from the control group.

The students observe, measure, infer. They see abnormalities and diminished birth weight. They write reports and put on seminars about their conclusions for other students as well as health and sobriety meetings.

Jacquier says the program makes an impression.

Most students tell him the mouse experiment is not enough to make them swear off drinking in the future, but they do conclude they want no alcohol near a fertilized human egg, Jacquier says.

“They have produced, with their own hands, proof that ‘Yes, it’s not just all those adults quacking at us.’ ”