Monday, Dec. 23, 1946
Recharged Babies
The newborn baby was pale, jaundiced. At Adelphi Hospital, Brooklyn, blood expert Alexander S. Wiener quickly made tests, found that the baby's blood was Rh positive, the mother's Rh negative.* Unless something was done quickly, the baby would probably die of erythroblastosis in a few hours. Dr. Wiener decided to change the baby's blood.
He called for a blood donor, drew a pint of carefully analyzed Rh negative blood and replaced part of the plasma with a salt solution to reduce the danger of clotting. Then he wheeled the infant into the operating room. He thrust a hollow needle into a vein in its left ankle, began to drip in the donor's blood. When he had dripped in 100 cc, a safe margin, he nicked the radial artery in the baby's right wrist, attached a tube, let the baby's blood drain out. To keep it flowing freely, he injected anti-clotting heparin.
The baby unconcernedly sucked on its bottle as a flush began to mount in its cheeks. Its blood vessels were slowly flushed clear of Rh blood (though a little remained, mixed with the donor's). Dr. Wiener let the flow continue until the concentration at the outgoing end was 90% new blood; in effect he drained and refilled the baby twice. (A newborn infant has about half a pint of blood.) After two and a half hours he handed back to the mother a healthy, rosy child.
In a similar dramatic operation, Dr. Wiener last week transfused another Rh baby (see cut). Complete transfusion is not new (Wiener himself, and others, had done it before), but the technique has been so perfected in recent months that doctors now consider it a tested cure for erythroblastosis.
About one baby in 300 is born with erythroblastosis. By blood tests of the mother during pregnancy, doctors can predict the disease with certainty. In such cases, Dr. Wiener gets everything prepared, stands ready to give the baby a complete recharging as soon as it is born.
* The Rh factor (so named because it was first discovered in rhesus monkeys) is a mysterious, hereditary component of red blood cells. Rh positive and Rh negative cells are sometimes incompatible; if Rh cells have been sensitized to the Rh factor, mixing them results in antibodies which either break down the Rh positive cells (causing anemia and jaundice) or produce clots (blocking circulation).
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