Word: fetuses
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...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...
Measure of Danger. One link between all these esoteric facts and human medicine is that the human fetus spends nine months in a fluid world, "breathing" through its mother's blood, then is catapulted into an air-breathing world. Dr. L. Stanley James, of Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, has tested newborn babies' blood. It contains chemicals showing that muscles were burning up starch and turning it into lactic acid during birth. If a birth takes unusually long, the concentration of lactic acid increases; it is a measure of how severely the baby...
...pregnant woman's viral infections may damage the baby in four ways: 1) by causing prompt abortion; 2) by killing the fetus, leading to later stillbirth; 3) by preventing normal development of organs, so that the baby is born deformed; 4) by infecting the baby so that its first days or weeks of independent life are an uphill struggle against disease. Viruses may strike at any time from the first few days after conception to the moment of delivery...
...Abortion and stillbirth commonly result from infections with the viruses of smallpox, ordinary measles (rubeola), polio, influenza and, less often, mumps. Measles works fast and is deadly to the fetus probably because of the high fever that accompanies the appearance of the red spots. Polio is not a deformer of the unborn, and usually is not deadly if the mother's infection comes late in pregnancy. But polio sometimes causes premature birth...