Author: Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader / Source: Today I Found Out
The story of a sad and tragic epidemic that happened just 70 years ago, but which few people know about today. (But you’re familiar with at least one of its victims.)
MONTEREY
On February 14, 1941, Dr. Stewart Clifford, a pediatrician in Boston, made a house call to check on one of his patients, the three-month-old daughter of a young rabbi.
The girl had been born several weeks premature, weighing just four pounds at birth, but had been doing well in the months since her birth. Unfortunately, something now seemed wrong. There was a grayness in the pupils of the girl’s eyes—and she appeared to have lost her ability to see. Clifford contacted his friend, Dr. Paul Chandler, one of Boston’s leading ophthalmologists. Chandler examined the girl, and told Clifford he had found something he had never seen before: there were strange gray masses attached to the rear of the lenses in both of the child’s eyes. Even worse, Clifford’s diagnosis was correct. The girl was completely blind.Just days later, another of Clifford’s patients, this one a seven-month-old baby, was discovered to have the same symptoms. That baby had also gone blind. And just as with the prior case, the child had been born prematurely.
EPIDEMIC
By 1942 several other cases of premature babies going blind, with the same symptoms—the appearance of gray masses inside the babies’ eyes—were reported in the Boston area. That same year, Clifford contacted Dr. Theodore Terry, professor of opthalmology at Harvard Medical School, and asked him to look into the mysterious cases. Terry studied five of the cases, and wrote an article about the condition in American Journal of Ophthalmology. When eye doctors around the country saw the article, similar stories were reported outside the Boston area.
By 1945 Terry had collected information on 117 premature infants who’d been affected by what was being called retrolental fibrofasia (RLF)—medical-ese for “scar tissue behind the lens of the eye.” The victims had varying degrees of vision loss—but they all had the characteristic mass of scar tissue inside their eyeballs. It was now obvious that these were not one-off cases: something was affecting the eyes of premature babies in a way that had not been seen before, and all of those cases—or at the very least the majority of them—were related.
Most ophthalmologists studying RLF were convinced that the condition was related to the fact that all its victims had been born prematurely. That was understandable. Premature birth can cause a wide variety of health problems, minor and serious, simply because the bodies of “preemies” haven’t completed the normal in utero development process that makes them ready for life outside the womb.
But Terry wasn’t convinced: if this was just another premature birth complication, why hadn’t it been seen before?
And most of the babies he’d personally examined had perfectly normal eyes at birth. They’d only been affected with the condition in the weeks—and in many cases months—after they were born. Terry was convinced something else was at play. Sadly, he wasn’t able to confirm this—he died of a heart attack in 1946, at the age of 47.
RLF
So what exactly was going on inside the eyes of the victims of RLF? First, by 1942 doctors had discovered that the condition primarily affected the retinas in the victims’ eyes, and not the lenses, as had previously been believed. (The retina is the thin layer of tissue that lines the inside of the rear of the eyeball. It holds the photoreceptors that “read” incoming light and sends that information to the brain via the optic nerves, where it’s translated into the images we see.)
The retinas in our eyes are rich in tiny blood vessels, through which they receive the nutrients they need to function. For unknown reasons, the retinas of RLF victims grew far too many blood vessels, many of which were abnormally shaped or defective. In the worst cases, this abnormal blood vessel growth caused…
The post The Curious Case of the Blind Baby Epidemic appeared first on FeedBox.