Birth Injury

May 13, 2018

Why do we tolerate up to 80,000 mothers each year suffering big injuries in childbirth?

by Patrick A. Malone

maternalmorbidity-300x193 Here is a sobering public health angle on Mother’s Day.

Experts on international health and development, including the likes of Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent and columnist Nick Kristof, long have argued that a key way to major improvements in distant lands rests in boosting the lot of women and girls. It’s an issue that clearly also needs attention closer to home.

National Public Radio and Pro Publica, a Pulitzer-winning investigative site, deserve yet more credit for their continuing dig into a shame of contemporary American health care — why U.S. mothers die in childbirth at a far higher rate than in all other developed countries. Their latest disturbing reporting focuses on some unacceptable numbers:

April 17, 2018

Big Medicine can’t hide patient inequities by calling them ‘disparities’ in care

by Patrick A. Malone

Big Medicine can paper over its troubles with basic fairness by slapping fancy terms on them: take “health and gender disparities,” for instance. But doctors, hospitals, and the rest of us can’t make medical care more equitable, accessible, safe, and affordable without looking at inequities, square on.

That’s why the New York Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press deserve credit for recent deep digs into the struggles of women, poor women, and especially black women with modern medicine:

Why are black women and their babies confronting a “life and death crisis?” asks the New York Times.

March 20, 2018

Harsh new glare falls on fertility clinics’ booming business after major mishaps

by Patrick A. Malone

Equipment failures in two clinics in Cleveland and San Francisco not only resulted in the loss of thousands of frozen human embryos and eggs, the incidents also have raised new concerns about safeguards and regulation of booming and costly fertility programs.

Experts said the mishaps were uncommon, and they were hard pressed to explain how advanced refrigeration systems, with rigorous checks and back-ups, could have malfunctioned at large, respected facilities, leading to a likely boom of lawsuits by women and couples against the University Hospitals Ahuja Medical Center’s Fertility Center in Cleveland and the Pacific Fertility Center in San Francisco.

The centers serve different types of women and couples, with the San Francisco facility dealing with younger, career-driven, and international patients eager to freeze eggs and embryos in hopes of starting families later in life. It has attracted public notice, partly because high-tech firms in the nearby Silicon Valley offer financial assistance to women employees who want to freeze their eggs. The Cleveland center, meantime, seeks to assist women and couples in the city’s western suburbs with infertility issues, especially through in vitro fertilization.

January 19, 2018

Sleep deaths and other evidence show U.S. has far to go on kids’ health

by Patrick A. Malone

Many grown-ups may love to grin, coo, and snuggle with babies and little kids, telling themselves that they’d bust through walls for the sake of adorable youngsters’ well-being. But evidence indicates the nation has a far way to go to better children’s health.

Although the U.S. spends more per capita than most wealthy, democratic nations on kids’ health care, American kids have lagged in the beneficial outcomes. Indeed, youngsters in this nation have a 70 percent greater chance of dying before adulthood than do their peers in industrialized nations.

January 5, 2018

What’s a key factor in black moms’ high death rates? Segregated hospitals

by Patrick A. Malone

The bad news for expectant black moms isn’t confined to those living in the nation’s capital: A new investigation has found higher risks of harm for women in New York, Florida, and Illinois when they deliver at hospitals that disproportionately serve black mothers.

ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative site, analyzed two years of hospital inpatient discharge data from the three states to “look in-depth at how well different facilities treat women who experience one particular problem — hemorrhages — while giving birth.” Reporters found negative patterns that underscored big woes identified by other research before:

[B]lack women … fare worse in pregnancy and childbirth, dying at a rate more than triple that of white mothers. And while part of the disparity can be attributed to factors like poverty and inadequate access to health care, there is growing evidence that points to the quality of care at hospitals where a disproportionate number of black women deliver, which are often in neighborhoods disadvantaged by segregation. Researchers have found that women who deliver at these so-called ‘black-serving’ hospitals are more likely to have serious complications — from infections to birth-related embolisms to emergency hysterectomies — than mothers who deliver at institutions that serve fewer black women.

August 23, 2017

New disclosures deepen scandal over DC hospital’s risky obstetrics care

by Patrick A. Malone

Doctors and hospitals across the country push the frontiers of medical science every day, finding new ways to improve health care and to change and save lives. But at the same time, some of medicine’s basics—like delivering babies safely and protecting mothers’ well being—also keep getting botched, especially for poor and black women. It’s a national disgrace, and it’s on sad, terrible display in the growing scandal in Southeast Washington’s only full-service hospital, which recently was ordered to stop delivering babies.

Why? The Washington Post, which has done some good digging and needs to do more, says that health regulators for the District of Columbia have provided sketchy details to officials of United Medical Center, which serves the poor and predominantly African American residents of the neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River, as to why the public hospital’s obstetrics unit was shut down for 90 days.

The paper says United’s staff failed to properly care for a newborn to ensure the infant didn’t acquire HIV from the baby’s mother, who was infected and had a high viral load. The hospital didn’t test the baby properly for HIV, failed to deliver the child via cesarean to reduce the chances of HIV infection, and didn’t administer a recommended antiretroviral drug as a postpartum precaution.

May 14, 2017

Way Too Many American Moms Still Die in Childbirth

by Patrick A. Malone

A new investigation of one of the great shames of American medical care raises big questions about why labor and delivery is more dangerous to new mothers in the U.S. than just about anywhere else in the civilized world.

To their considerable credit, National Public Radio and Pro Publica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative news site, have joined forces to examine why 700 to 900 American women die each year from pregnancy related causes, and 65,000 nearly die.

The news organizations say Americans are “three times more likely to die in childbirth than women in Canada, and six times more likely than Scandinavian women.” And while U.S. maternal deaths are rising, their numbers were plunging in developed countries from England to South Korea.

February 10, 2017

Pot may be more legal and common, but it’s still unwise for pregnant moms

by Patrick A. Malone

Although marijuana is marching toward legalization across the United States, expectant moms may wish to think long and hard still about smoking or ingesting a substance that has become as ubiquitous in some households as aspirin or a bottle of chardonnay. The New York Times has delved into this discussion, even as other news outlets recently have provided parental warnings about hype over apps for baby care and tossing some toxic homeopathic teething remedies.

Pot? Not for expectant moms

Let’s turn first, and not be blue noses about it, to why moms would consider pot while pregnant. Data show that few do (an estimated 4 percent of more than 200,000 women in one 12-year sample — though the number had doubled in recent time). For younger women, the answer may be, just because. They don’t equate it with risk but with recreation. They say they try to be cautious with it, just as they might curtail their alcohol consumption but still have a rare drink. Older and expectant moms may use pot, as many women do, because they find it helps with depression, anxiety, stress, pain, nausea and vomiting.

December 21, 2016

New cautions issued on babies and anesthesia, newborn screenings

by Patrick A. Malone

Some new cautions have been issued on some key aspects of children’s health care. The federal government is increasing its warnings on anesthetic use for children and expectant moms, while a newspaper investigation is raising issues with common newborn screenings and their inconsistency and inaccuracy. Meantime, a health news site is adding to questions about a much-touted program to reduce head trauma harms in kids’ athletics.

FDA warnings on anesthetics for babies, expectant moms

Let’s start with the federal Food and Drug Administration cautions on “repeated and lengthy use of general anesthetic and sedation drugs” with children younger than 3 and pregnant women. The agency says it has been studying potential harms of these powerful medications for these two groups since 1999, and will label almost a dozen common anesthetics and sedation drugs with new warnings.

October 30, 2016

Zika grabs headlines but herpes-related CMV harms more babies

by Patrick A. Malone

Although awareness has grown about viruses like Zika that can devastate the unborn, cytomegalovirus (CMV), a much more common and equally harmful prenatal viral infection, doesn’t get discussed with pregnant moms as much as it should. Medical counseling, testing, and administration of anti-viral medications could save more babies and their families from a lifetime of CMV woes.

More than half of adults older than 40 and one in three children by the age of 5 have been infected with CMV, a common virus in the herpes family. An estimated 1 in 150 babies gets infected at birth with CMV, with 1 in 5 of these infants sickened or harmed, including with hearing loss, microcephaly (a deformity so they have tiny heads), intellectual deficits or impaired vision. This means CMV seriously harms as many as 8,000 youngsters annually across the United States, and it is fatal for about 400 infants.

Affected families and medical experts have told the New York Times that more needs to be done to increase CMV awareness, testing, and prevention, especially in comparison to the public health attention that has been paid to Zika and the damage it may inflict on the unborn.