Old news but worthy…

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June 2007 is an important landmark for infertility treatments as it marks the birth of the 3000,000th child born through Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) – 28 years after Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby was born in Manchester on the 26th of July, 1978.

It has not been a bed of roses though, with Brown’s birth sparking off heated debates on the ethical and health dimensions of such a procedure. Nevertheless, this treatment has been a silver lining for the 200,000 couples who benefited from it in 2002 and the thousands more thereafter. Not only has the number of couples opting for Assisted Reproductive Technology increased, but so has the rate of successful deliveries. The 1980s saw only 6% healthy babies when in vitro fertilization was used but now 20% of fertility treatment cycles result in a successful delivery.

These figures are heartening in the wake of statistics claiming one in seven British couples to have problems conceiving and that people are now opting to start a family much later than before. Female infertility is largely caused by complications in the fallopian tubes, hormonal disorders or a condition called endometriosis where tissue lining the uterus is found elsewhere. In the case of men, low sperm count or inability of the sperm to swim leads to infertility. It is estimated that 40% of infertile couples have complications with the male partner, 40% with the female partner and 20% with both partners.

With the increase in demand for infertility treatment, science has caught up by devising new remedies. 1992 saw the success of intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), a treatment where a single sperm is directly made to fuse with the egg. This procedure addressed male infertility while previous ones had focused on female infertility – now over half the treatments use ICSI.

On the flip side, Britain is behind most other European nations when it comes to couples having financial assistance for such procedures. Denmark conducts three times the 633 treatment cycles per million people that the UK does, followed by Germany and Sweden. The government is being pressurized to implement the guidelines of NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) which state that couples should receive atleast three cycles funded by the NHS. Also, it would be a win-win situation since calculations show that the government would receive over £147,000 per IVF baby through the baby’s lifetime.”

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