Conception & Cyclones

A Montana baby was taking shape in its mother's womb. Along came a cyclone which shocked the mother and insulted the embryo. When the baby was born it was a hermaphrodite.

Similar sequences of conception and storm produce babies with cleft palates in Maine, babies with uncompleted spines (spina bifida) in Vermont, babies with genital defects in the U. S. Northwest.

A rational explanation of those regional anomalies, which Professor William Ferdinand Petersen, University of Illinois pathologist, elaborated last week in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, has had to wait on modern observations of human physiology.

Babies in the forming, physiologists now know, are sensitive to changes in the amount of oxygen the mothers get into their blood. Embryos also are sensitive to relative acidity of maternal blood, and to spasms and dilations of maternal blood vessels.

Reasoned Professor Petersen: "Inasmuch as the cyclonic ciculation in America is unusual. . . it seems probable a reflection of the organic disturbances might be found in greater injury to the embryo in certain regions."

For confirmation he plotted Federal statistics of malformed children who died in first year, of imperfect men drafted for the War. The State of Washington showed the greatest proportion of dead malformed infants. Proceeding eastward the traced of these dead babies "can be traced beginning in Colorado, passing through Kansas, spreading to include the Great Lakes region and ending in New England, where Vermont presents the highest rate. When we proceed north beyond the regions of cyclones and to a maritime type of climate, Newfoundland for instance, the rate drops." Southern States where the climate is equable, have a negligible number of malformation births.

Analysis of draftees showed the difference between men born in the North and in the South. Stormy Maine and Vermont presented five times as many cleft palates as did bland Arkansas and Arizona. Genital defects were excessively high in the Northwest. Testicular defects formed a track from Montana to Iowa, hypospadias from Montana to Illinois. Hermaphrodites were more common in the Northwest. Spina bifida, on the other hand, was apparently high at both the northeastern and the northwestern extremes of the U. S and in addition, formed a track from Nebraska through Missouri and Tennessee to South Carolina.

Professor Petersen presented reasons for those peculiarities of distributions. Said he: "Assuming that malformations are possibly due both to a genetic and to an environmental factor, I shall disregard the genetic phase. . .In the Northeast we find a high cleft-palate rate. We deal with a population that has been domiciled under the present climatic conditions for perhaps some 200 years or more. . . . Cleft palate and harelip are not fatal and do not prevent reproduction. Familiar strains present in the population would continue and the climatic instability would, if anything, enhance the frequency of such defects. . . .

"When we examine the draft statistics for the northwestern States we deal with a population that has been exposed to the severe climatic conditions of the region for only two generations, since the mass of the population has been settled there since 1880 Here we have a new stock exposed to unusually severe climatic conditions and, in addition, living at a relatively high altitude. . . Here we have the genital malformations in the region of the cyclonic infall and along the storm tracks. Is it not likely that these malformations, which would tend to diminish in frequency in an older, permanently domiciled population. . . appear here because a new population not previously subject to such climatic trauma would yield a relatively larger number of malformations of this type?"

Northern children with incompleted spines usually die young. In the climatically calm South they are apt to grow up, a condition which explains the high rate of spina bifida in balmy South Carolina.

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