The Pregnancy Risk That Doctors Won’t Mention
Updated at 4:35 p.m. ET on June 13, 2023
The nonexhaustive list of things women are told to avoid while pregnant includes cat litter, alfalfa sprouts, deli meat, runny egg yolks, pet hamsters, sushi, herbal teas, gardening, Brie cheeses, aspirin, meat with even a hint of pink, hot tubs. The chance that any of these will harm the baby is small, but why risk it?
Yet few doctors in the U.S. tell pregnant women about the risk of catching a ubiquitous virus called cytomegalovirus, or CMV. The name might be obscure, but CMV is the leading infectious cause of birth defects in America—far ahead of toxoplasmosis from cat litter or microbes from hamsters. Bafflingly, the majority of babies infected in the womb are unaffected, but an estimated 400 born with CMV die every year. Thousands more end up with hearing and vision loss, epilepsy, developmental delays, or microcephaly, in which the head and brain are unusually small. Exactly why the virus so dramatically affects some babies but not others is unknown. There is no cure and no vaccine.
Amanda Devereaux’s younger child,
