Last week I spent most of my time at the Irish and American Pediatric Society’s annual meeting. The good news: it was in Nashville, the bad news: I was Chair of the academic portion of the meeting. I left exhausted and fulfilled. Fulfilled because I learned so much.
The papers presented made me wish I was still in active practice and at least 20 years younger. But, they also left me a little sad and very frustrated. Because after all the time we pediatricians have spent teaching good parenting philosophy and technique, we still have many kids suffering from the failures of their parents.
I’ll just mention a few, and in the coming months elaborate more on each one.
Herpes Simplex virus, as we have known for a long time, causes genital herpes. We heard a couple of papers describing babies who had herpes infection of the brain and died of the disease. Those who live usually have severe physical and mental damage. This systemic disease is acquired from the mothers during delivery. Human papillomavirus (HPV) is well known for causing cervical, vaginal, mouth and throat cancer as well as genital warts. Newborns may develop warts in their throats, trachea, and lungs.
Unbelievable as it sounds the incidence of congenital syphilis has increased in recent years even-thought treatment of syphilis in the mother is readily treated, and better yet, prevented. Likewise, babies can be born with congenital HIV (AIDS). The good news here is that with modern treatment most cases can be prevented.
Finally, we learned more about NAS than we wanted to know! Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome occurs when babies of drug addicted mothers withdraw from their mother’s drug. It results in infant irritability, tremors, vomiting, diarrhea, poor feeding, inconsolable crying, and often seizures. Babies need to stay in the newborn ICU for many days, even weeks. But worst of all, many of them will never have normal emotional, mental, or physical health. Contrary to popular belief, many, if not most, of the mothers are not addicted to street drugs, but to pain medicine, tranquilizers, sedatives or other physician prescribed medications. One study in Tennessee showed 42% of addicted mothers took only prescribed pain meds. An estimated 13,000 infants are born in the US each year, 1,000 in Tennessee, with NAS.
The thing that sickens me the most is that all of these diseases are given to babies by their mothers and are all are preventable. All result from “misbehavior” of the parents, due to poor decision making and totally under the control of the parents. What a gift to give to your newborn.
We doctors, pastors, teachers and society in general have all failed to teach that all behavior has consequences.
Pray that we can get a handle on this type of behavior before it destroys our country and the free world.
I’ll be discussing each of these challenges during the following months. Feel free to contact me with any questions you may have about any of them, or, if you have ideas as to cause and prevention. Thanks.