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The trouble is that in the apparently crucial second month, many women do not know they are pregnant. At this stage, some doctors think, thalidomide may cause malformations in as many as 20% of cases. Dr. Lenz fears that there have been 2,000 to 3,000 blighted babies in West Germany alone. Many are stillborn or die within a few days, but two out of three survive.
With a drug so widely and often casually used, it is almost impossible to be sure whether a woman was taking thalidomide at the critical time. Last week in the Lancet, a canny Scottish doctor told how he had done it. In Stirlingshire. Dr.
A. L. Speirs questioned ten mothers of malformed babies about drugs they had taken. He got vague or negative answers.
More strikingly, he got the same kind of answers from their doctors. Dr. Speirs refused to give up, had the prescription records searched. He got his evidence: no fewer than eight of the ten mothers had been taking Distaval, and a ninth might have been. Distaval and thalidomide compounds were pulled off the British market in early December. But many women now pregnant may have been taking the drug, and the Lancet raises editorially an ominous question for doctors: whether to terminate pregnancy in such cases.