Word: phocomelia
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Relentlessly, Lenz assembled the evidence against thalidomide. Phocomelia (seal limbs) had been one of the rarest of congenital defects until 1960, the year after thalidomide went on the market. Then the incidence of the condition increased exponentially, and Lenz had a damning graph showing that it went up on a curve exactly paralleling that of thalidomide sales-but with an eight-month time lag. Lenz explained that he explored other suggested explanations for the increase in phocomelia, such as X rays, TV radiation, fallout and attempted abortions. As a cautious clinical scientist, he eventually rejected them all. Said Lenz: "There...
...that causality cannot be proved by statistics. They insisted that so long as no one knows how thalidomide actually works inside the human system, it is impossible to forge a link between the drug and a child's malformation. Lenz answered that thalidomide has been shown to cause phocomelia in rhesus and other monkey species in which the condition does not occur naturally. For doctors to seek comparable proof in man would be at least unethical and in most countries illegal. Said Lenz: "You are demanding a kind of scientific perfectionism that is not applicable to medicine. Despite...
...consisted of assorted internal malformations in newborn babies, plus an upsurge in one hitherto rare condition: phocomelia or "seal limbs." so called because the hands and feet are like flippers, attached close to the body with little or no arm or leg. Hamburg University's Pediatrician Widukind Lenz. 43. began to suspect Contergan because he found that in many cases the mothers had taken it late in the second month of pregnancy, when the fetus' limbs are forming...
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