Medical Thoughts

Note that we are not doctors or even trained lay people. We are just passing on our understanding of potential medical problems that any child in a Baby Home might have.

Tests. The kind you can’t study for. The kind that every baby in the Baby Homes here is given. The kind that frighten every parent.

Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C. Syphilis, and HIV/AIDS are not exactly the tests that you want to consider, even for yourself, forget about for a tiny baby. But these are tests that are required.

Very rarely is the medical background of a child known who has been placed in a Baby Home. There might be some information about the mother, but most likely not. There is almost never any information about the father. And you don’t know if the information is correct.

Some of the children in the Baby Home truly have been abandoned by their parents, dropped off somewhere without a note saying why or who they are. Each Group room at the Baby Home has a roster of children posted. You can see the family name first, then the given name (in the Kazkahstani/Russian tradition), followed by the date of birth. When an unknown child arrives, a name is posted, but no birth date. Presuming no more information becomes available, a scientific guess is made after some medical tests, and a birth date is added a few days later.

Here, as in any former country of the Soviet Union, there is another problem that you have to watch out for. However, you can’t run any tests to confirm the existence of that problem, nor can you rule it out. That problem is Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder or FASD. FASD is caused by the mother of the baby drinking during pregnancy. Alcoholism is a very serious problem in the former Soviet Union. Alcoholic mothers often do not stop drinking during pregnancy, nor do they often seek medical attention at all. A common initial potential manifestation of FASD is with all three of low birth weight, small length, and small head size. Low birth weight and small length but a normal head size are usually not an indication of FASD. That’s because the body is smart and provides nutrition first to the brain, then to the rest of the body. However, babies affected by alcohol don’t receive the proper nutrition to their brains either. This lack of nutrition to the brain can cause minor or major developmental problems later on. These can include Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD, what we used to call hyperactivity), developmental delays, and school learning difficulties. The problem with all this is that you can’t run any simple medical tests at any age to confirm the existence of FASD. There are other clues at an early age, but you can only determine if FASD is present by looking at all the symptoms and ruling out other causes. Even that can only really be accomplished at age 5 or 6.

Hepatitis B and C, Syphilis, HIV/AIDS, and FASD are all very real dangers.

Visit a Web site such as http://www.mayoclinic.com for information about these and other conditions.