There’s an article in today’s New York Times (see link below) about a consortium of universities that failed to tell parents of severely premature babies that the use of heightened oxygen levels in incubation can cause blindness and other serious effects. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about this is that the blinding eye disease associated with oxygen in incubators has been widely known in medical circles since the late 1950’s. Accordingly, leaving this information off of consent forms for parents appears both incomprehensible and perhaps intentional.
Retinopathy of prematurity is the blinding eye disease that I have. I was born three months early in 1955, just before ophthalmologists at Johns Hopkins announced the link between oxygen and blindness in premature infants.
This story does contain more than a whiff of scandal.
Posted with Blogsy
Planet of the Blind 