Flu in Pregnancy

A thousand old wives' tales hold that there is a close connection between a woman's illnesses during pregnancy and the health of her baby, but medical researchers were long unable to prove anything except the damaging effects of German measles in the first three months of gestation (TIME, Dec. 31, 1956). Then came the 1957 midsummer warning that an epidemic of Asian influenza was imminent, and physicians braced themselves for a test. Last week, in the London medical journal Lancet, two Irish investigators reported that Asian flu is a potent cause of fetal abnormalities, many of them fatal.

Drs. Victoria P. Coffey and William J. E. Jessop followed the histories of 1,326 women at three Dublin hospitals, half of whom had Asian flu while pregnant. Of 663 flu victims, 639 had normal babies while 24 had malformed children. Among an equal number of women who escaped flu, 653 had normal babies and only ten lad malformed children. There was no notable difference in the number of still or premature births. The malformations, concentrated among the women who had had flu in the first three months of pregnancy, were mainly in the central nervous system and included a disproportionate number of cases in which the infant's brain failed to develop.

On this evidence, Asian flu joins German measles as a crippler and killer of children in the womb.

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