{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0152321083172147, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0036266924564796904, 'mean_word_length': 4.9354375896700144, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Medicine and Books

Margaret and Arthur Wynn have travelled widely and dug deeply into regional and national statistics from many countries to try to find out why the perinatal mortality rate and the incidence of handicapped children in the British Isles are so high. The causes, it turns out, are manifold and the answers much more complex than recent controversy among paediatricians about perinatal facilities in hospitals would suggest. There seem to be two main problems: babies of low birth weight, and babies with malformations of the central nervous system such as spina bifida and anencephalus which arise in the first trimester of pregnancy. The latter occur so much more often in children of Irish mothers that they are thought of as a "curse on the Celts." Popular belief that diseased potatoes might be responsible foundered when investigations disclosed that white bread with fewer added vitamins than in the rest of the UK has supplanted potatoes as the staple food of the lower socioeconomic groups in Eire. Emigration to the USA breaks the curse: as soon as the Irish take to the indigenous diet there their incidence of braindamaged infants falls to normal levels. This suggests dietary deficiency as a likely cause. The Wynns cite epidemics of malformed babies during food shortages in other countries. The first well-documented one occurred after the siege of Paris in 1870. There was another in Boston during the depression of the early 1930s and several in European countries occupied by the Germans in the last war and in German cities immediately after it ended. The common factor in all these epidemics was shortage of food. In Oslo during the German occupation in the 1940s the effects of food shortage were counteracted by vitamin supplements. Vitamins were given to 700 pregnant women who then produced exceptionally few low birthweight babies. In Zaragossa, a rural province of Spain, poor peasant women have a lower incidence of brain-damaged children than many areas of the UK. No need of vitamin supplements there, because their traditional diet is rich in them. In Sweden intensive dietary education, which emphasises the importance of vitamins for the health of future babies, has been part of the school curriculum since the war. This is reinforced by the district midwives whom young women consult about contraceptive advice. Sweden has the lowest perinatal mortality rate in the world and a very low incidence of handicapped children, which suggests cause and effect. The authors, one of whom is a statistician, analysed the mortality rates of different countries and different socioeconomic groups in the same countries in considerable detail and they have come up with some surprising correlations. They include the following. Populations with a high death rate from cancer in middle age have more malformed babies. Middleaged women in lower socioeconomic groups in Scotland have a very high death rate from cancer, and a very high proportion of their babies are malformed. Members of the British armed Forces and their wives have the highest mortality rates for cancer, above average rates for diseases of the digestive and cardiovascular systems, and high death rates from all causes. Farmers and their wives, by contrast, have very low mortality rates from these diseases. The inference is that good nutrition increases resistance to many diseases, including cancer, and poor nutrition lowers resistance. Research into what members of the armed Forces and their wives eat, and then changing it, would be an easy way of testing the hypothesis. The book ends with the Spastics Society's resolution at a public meeting last year. It calls upon the Government to improve services for pregnant women and unborn babies, create first-class maternity units with special and intensive care facilities for the newborn in every health area, finance further research into the cause and prevention of handicap, and start a campaign for the health education of women. All laudable objectives but, on the evidence presented in this book, measures to improve the nation's diet would seem an immediate priority.