Category Archives: Birth Defects
Birth Defect Caused by Air?
The common air pollutant benzene has been the subject of a recent study in Texas. It seems that women who live in Texas neighborhoods that have higher levels of benzene due to refineries and automobile exhaust have been found to have a higher chance of giving birth to babies with a serious neurological birth defect. Benzene has long been known to be highly toxic and related to cancer and immune system damage. This new study performed by a team of researchers from the University of Texas School of Public Health and the Texas Department of State Health Services has linked benzene for the first time to a birth defect that proves in more than one way that air pollution can cause harm to a fetus. The results of this study show that pregnant women exposed to high levels of benzene had up to a two times greater risk of giving…
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Posted in Birth Defects
Tagged birth defect, pollutant benzene, Texas Department of State Health Services
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Brain Cooling Used to Fight Birth Injury
An innovative new therapy is being used to fight birth injuries by cooling the baby’s body. It has been discovered that if a newborn’s body temperature is lowered to about 6 degrees below normal within six hours that it could decrease the damage done to the brain from birth injuries. The idea is that the low temperature causes the body to slip into whole body hypothermia. There have been many cases over the years when the protective benefits of cold temperatures for the brain have been noted. For example young children who have drowned in icy lakes and been resuscitated have recovered with little or no brain damage. Research has been done in the United States which has shown that cooling provides benefits to infants who were born deprived of oxygen. Babies whose body temperature was lowered to 92.3degrees within 6 hours and kept there for 72 hours have been…
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Posted in Birth Defects, Birth Trauma
Tagged birth injury, Brain Cooling
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German man wants to force Bayer to acknowledge defect with pregnancy drug
A German newspaper recently reported that letters written by scientists in the UK and Germany indicate that concern was being raised about the pregnancy test drug Duogynon in 1967 – yet it was still being prescribed until at least 1975. André Sommer from Pfronten, Bavaria, is suing Bayer for the defects he suffered after his mother took the drug while pregnant with him in 1975. He was born with severe problems with his bladder and sexual organs. His case will be heard soon by the Berlin District Court, and will include the documents which have recently come to light in which doctors wrote to each other about problems they had observed. “The seeming relation between the increase in birth defects and the sale of the pregnancy test is pretty alarming,” one scientist wrote on November 1967. “We have to be extremely careful,” when using the drug with pregnant women, another…
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Posted in Birth Defects, Dangerous Drugs, Pregnancy
Tagged Bayer, defect, pregnancy drug
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