Thalidomide birth defects caused

At the same time, the public s faith in science and technology was eroding. Radioactive fallout from atomic bomb tests was poisoning cows milk, and the thalidomide antinausea medicine prescribed to pregnant women in Europe had caused severe birth defects in 8000 children. Above all, the enormous growth of the chemical industry and pollution after World War II put public pressure on Congress to clean up the nation s air and water. 

Thalidomide, a prescription drng nsed as a tranqniUzer and flu medicine for pregnant women in Enrope to replace dangerous barbiturates that cause 2000 to 3000 deaths per year by overdoses, was found to cause birth defects. Thalidomide had been kept off the market in the United States because of the insistence that more safety data be produced for the drug. 

An unexpected increase in the incidence of certain rare and devastating birth defects - absence of limbs and reduced limb length - was reported beginning in 1960, first in West Germany and then in other areas of the world. Thalidomide was identified as the cause through the work of W. G. McBride in Australia and W. Lenz in West Germany. 

Like fluorochlorobromomethane, thalidomide exists in right-handed and left-handed forms. Thalidomide as marketed contained equal amounts of both forms. As was learned later, the beneficial effect for pregnant women is mostly due to one of these forms. The potential to cause birth defects is largely due to the other. However, thalidomide would have been a hopeless case for morning sickness even if the marketed drug contained only the good molecule. The two enantiomers of thalidomide are interconverted in vivo. Any threat to the ferns is unacceptable. 

Thalidomide Developed as a sedative in the early 1960s but found to cause a rare birth defect, phocomelia. In 1962 legislation was passed that new drugs must undergo sufficient animal and human testing prior to approval for use by the US FDA. 

In 1998, the FDA approved the use of thalidomide for the treatment of lesions associated with erythema nodosum leprosum. Because of thalidomide s potential for causing birth defects, the distribution of thalidomide was permitted only under tightly controlled conditions. Nevertheless, because of its use for patients with leprosy thalidomide has been identified again as a current teratogen, now in South America. 

The following ball-and-stick molecular model is a representation of thalidomide, a drug that causes birth defects when taken by expectant mothers but is valuable for its use against leprosy. The lines indicate only the connections between atoms, not whether the bonds are single, double, or triple (red = O, gray = C, blue = N, ivory = H). 

Thalidomide, a sleeping pill, is discovered to be the cause of widespread and similar birth defects in babies born in England and western Europe. The FDA bans the drug in the United States. 

Tragedy in the United States was averted by Dr. Kelsey s efforts. Her refusal to approve the thalidomide NDA without further proof of safety occurred just as news from Europe revealed that thalidomide was responsible for a birth defect that caused infants to be born with flipper-like limbs. This near miss in the United States led to passage of the 1962 Kefauver-Harris Amendments to the 1938 act. These amendments established requirements that testing for both safety and proof of drug efficacy had to be conducted in well-controlled clinical trials before an NDA could be approved and a drug allowed to reach the market (Bren, 2001). 

Thalidomide was used to treat morning sickness in the late 1950s, but was soon discovered to have caused a number of birth defects. For a time it was believed that the birth defects were due to one enantiomer of this drug and that the other enantiomer was harmless. However, it was later found that either enantiomer will racemize under the acidic conditions of the stomach so the harmless enantiomer is converted to the harmful one. Suggest a mechanism for this racemization. 

The discovery of how thalidomide causes birth defects has suggested a potential use for it as an anti-cancer drug. The growth of blood vessels is an important part of the development of tumours, which if it were stopped would limit their invasion of tissues and therefore the spread through the body. 

How differences in the three-dimensional structure of starch and cellulose affect their shape and function (Section 5.1) The three-dimensional structure of thalidomide, the anti-nausea dmg that caused catastrophic birth defects (Section 5.5) How mirror image isomers can have drastically different properties— the analgesic ibuprofen, the antidepressant fluoxetine, and the anti-inflammatory agent naproxen (Section 5.13)... 

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