Word: fetus
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Ever since the days of Hippocrates the womb has been regarded as a privileged sanctuary in which the fetus was protected against most kinds of harm. Any disturbance promised a premature birth, and doctors did not dare to attempt direct treatment of the unborn. But the more they learned about anemia from Rh incompatibility and the more certain they became of saving nine babies out of ten who are threatened by this disease, the more frustrated they became about the tenth...
...Cooke was careful to point out that for the vast majority of women and their babies, the prevailing intake of vitamin D does no harm. But in unpredictable cases, any excess over normal requirements causes unnatural calcium deposition in the fetus: its bones, especially the base of the skull, grow unusually dense, and chalky deposits narrow the aorta. Sometimes the aorta is narrowed around the origin of the renal arteries so that the kidneys are starved of blood and the affected baby suffers from extremely high blood pressure...
Ever since thalidomide became a drug-industry scandal, medical researchers have made every effort to find ways and means of determining the effects of drugs on unborn children. But how to study a developing fetus in utero reacting to drugs passed through its mother's bloodstream? Last week such research was given a hopeful boost when the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development awarded a $48,500 contract to the Marquardt Corp., of Van Nuys, Calif., to probe the effects of drugs on embryonic opossums...
...next 60 to 70 days in its mother's pouch, firmly and continuously attached to her breast. During that period, it grows and behaves much as a human embryo in normal gestation. Marquardt researchers are already well acquainted with the opossum, having learned how to detach the tiny fetus from the mother's breast to feed it artificially. Mixing drugs with the food, the researchers should be able to observe firsthand their effects on a growing fetus...
...immunity. There is just one vital precaution. No infected child should be allowed anywhere near a woman who is-or even may be-in the first three months of pregnancy; if she has escaped the disease in childhood, the virus may cause blindness or crippling heart defects in the fetus...