There’s a silent, deadly killer stalking the hospital corridors of the UK. Every year it carries off 1000 babies [1] It affects between 5% and 8% of all pregnancies. When it turns severe it poses a clear and present danger to about 2% of all pregnancies. it’s called Pre-eclampsia, and no one knows what causes it. And, if you scale up the UK figures to get the world wide picture, it gets worse. If we accept the figure of 133.99 million births in 2022, then that implies no less than 6 699 500 cases globally. Quite an epidemic.
Have you seen much about this lately on a news feed or channel near you? Maybe it gets covered occasionally by magazine journalists. Yet all our searches only revealed sites like the NHS, Wikipedia and so on. [2] [3] All high on integrity, helpfulness and informed communication. But where’s the punchy, angry journalism that might push this one over the line and get it the attention it’s so obviously crying out for?
Whisper it if you dare-is this because it only affects women? When a cause and cure for the new disease of AIDS was needed, it all went rather quickly, didn’t it? Remember something called COVID-19? Older readers might. From outbreak to vaccines to control took a couple of years. Yet eclampsia has clearly been around for thousands of years, and still a clear causal mechanism eludes us.
Perhaps if a little less was spent on things that make men look good- like fast cars, fighter planes and gargantuan yachts- and a bit more on things that help women live-biomedical research comes to mind here-we might all do better in the long run.
[1]https://www.wrh.ox.ac.uk/research/pre-eclampsia
[2] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/pre-eclampsia/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-eclampsia
#eclampsia #preeclampsia #women #health #pregnancy #mother and baby
Learning, Science and Society 