Premature Baby Birthrate Goes Up, But Research Focuses on Drugs

by Heidi Stevenson

31 October 2009

Terrible things have been happening to the public's health in the last 20-30 years. Asthma, diabetes, autism, neurological disorders, and cancer rates have been rising dramatically. At the same time, the rate of premature births has risen sharply. All of these disorders have one thing in common. Rather than trying to find the causes, our medical system has focused on treating the symptoms, virtually always with ever more poisonous drugs and toxic treatments, like surgery.

The result has been almost uniformly dismal.

A case in point is the recent news that a drug has been found to—possibly…well, maybe… perhaps—prevent premature labor. Reading further down in the articles, the truth comes out: The drug isn't new. It's an anticancer agent, Trichostatin A (TSA), and there's no possibility of using it to stop early labor because it's so toxic. That, though, didn't stop the Newcastle University researchers from looking into it.

Premature Births Increasing

Premature birth is a serious concern. Rates have been rising in both the US and UK. In the US, it has risen 25% in 20 years. As many as 1 in 8 babies born in the UK are premature. It is the main cause of death during the first month of life. Babies who survive are often faced with serious limitations and lifelong health problems, including delayed development, cerebral palsy, mental retardation, chronic lung disease, neurological disorders, and poor vision and hearing.

New Drug Research for Premature Birth

The Newcastle research consisted of taking muscle samples from women giving birth via caesarian section, and exposing them to TSA to see what effects it might have on both natural contractions and ones artificially induced by oxytocin. In a nutshell, they showed that one tiny part of a single enzyme involved in uterine relaxation is increased by TSA.

The research leader, Professor Nick Europe-Finner, said:

We will not give this drug to a patient because it can damage as many as 10% of the genes in a cell. But it does show us that other more specific agents that act on the same enzymes but only one at a time are worth investigating.

Translation:

Give us more money—lots and lots of money—and we'll find some chemical that has some teensy-tiny effect on stopping uterine contractions. Then, we can patent it and sell the patent to a giant pharmaceutical firm, which will hype it as the cure for early labor. While they're raking in the lucre, they can cover up the rising toll on women and children, until it can no longer be hidden. But don't worry, they'll have made their profits. I'll have become famous as a brilliant researcher…and make the rounds of the talk shows.

The hype and fearmongering have already started. As can be seen by the identical news reports, most articles on the subject obviously came from a single press release. One line routinely repeated reads:

Premature birth can have negative, long-lasting effects on both the mother and the baby. For many women, preterm labour is shocking, frightening and unexpected.

In other words, all this research is being done to alleviate the bad effects of premature birth. We're just trying to help. (And if you believe that…)

Avoiding the Real Issue

Speaking for the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Professor Jane Norman stated:

When you consider that preterm birth rates are rising in all four countries of the UK, a new more effective drug is badly needed.

No, it isn't. We need to find out why so many babies are born too soon. Then, we need to remove the cause—or, as a society, acknowledge that we're willing to pay the price in devastated lives.

It's long past time for our medical paradigm to be corrected, to start looking for causes—outside of the profit-motivated search for genetic roots, with its associated development of drugs—and to find ways to prevent the occurrence of chronic disease.