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resulting in an imperfect baby has always been with us, it is a
hazard which any couple starting a family in love and faith has
to face. But that risk is unpredictable, and if a damaged infant
should result, at least the parents' conscience is clear. This is
a misfortune which has lighted on them, not retribution. This
cannot be said about Thalidomide. The damage it does is not due
to blind chance, it is man made, and the parents, the doctor,the
chemist - in fact all society, cannot escape a feeling of guilty
responsibility. This emotion has magnified the distress inevitably
roused in parents by the birth of a deformed baby and so has
engendered a public clamour about these stricken babies which
their number hardly justifies.
Thalidomide is responsible for about 400 damaged babies over
the 18 months that it has been on sale in this country. Of these,
about 240 have survived and will need long term treatment and
education using these words in their broadest sense. But how
does this number compare with the 1,200 Mongols, or the 750 children
with spina bifida, paralysed below the waist who are born
every year? In fact, the total of all major congenital deform
ities comes to about 1% of all babies born, that is 7,500 severely
affected children each year. Even though half of them soon die,the
community of seriously crippled children grows by 3,500 yearly.
Against this background, the once for-all addition of 240
Thalidomide casualties is not a great one. It is, of course, the
knowledge that these need not have happened which is so disturbing.
I have written above that the risk of congenital deformity is
unpredicatable. This is true for the individual family not for
society as a whole. Dr. Frazer Roberts, the eminent geneticist,
has pointed that the the overall figure for serious deformity is
as high as 1.40. When we think of the staggeringly complex
development the foetus must needs undergo, and the risk of death
by drowning, suffocation or apoplexy he has to surmount at the
moment of birth, the figure does not seem large, but in terms of
human heart ache it is enormous. At the moment we do not know how
to avoid it. It is a fact, though only cold comfort, to the
desolated families, that Thalidomide has raised the chance of
congenital deformity by less than 5%.
I should like to thank the school doctors for referring the
children to me, and the family doctors for authorising the refer
rals. I should also like to thank my colleagues at Whipps Cross
Hospital, Dr. P. Tettmar, radiologist, and Dr. W W. Walther,
pathologist, for allowing me full use of their facilities.