Pregnancy test ‘cover-up’ claim over birth defects

A DRUGS giant has been accused of a 40-year cover-up over a pregnancy test linked to serious birth defects.

The test prescribed to around 1.5million British women in the 1960s and 1970s involved taking two pills to check whether they were pregnant.

The medication, Primodos, has since been taken off the market, but it has been blamed for brain damage, heart defects and shortened limbs. Campaigners have labelled it the ‘forgotten thalidomide’ after the morning sickness drug from 1950s and 1960s that caused deformities in thousands of children.

A committee of British experts will now examine previously unseen documents linking Primodos to similar birth defects.

Some of the children born to mothers who took the pills died before adulthood, while many of those still alive are deaf, blind, have shortened limbs or problems with their spines.

Women took two pills to induce their monthly period and if this did not happen within a few days, the pregnancy was confirmed.

Yet they contained a powerful dose of the hormone progester- one, which is now used in contraceptive pills and the morning-after pill to prevent pregnancy.

The German manufacturer Schering presumed that if a woman was pregnant, the hormones would be reabsorbed in her blood without harm.

But the concentrations were extremely high – one dose of Pri- modos equates to 40 oral contraceptive pills.

The documents unearthed by the Berlin National Archives will be scrutinised by the UK Government’s Commission on Human Medicines’ Expert Working Group on Hormone Pregnancy Tests.

Campaigners hope it will provide evidence that will enable families to sue for hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation. An attempt by 700 families to sue the manufacturer collapsed in 1982.

Labour MP Yasmin Qureshi, who has long supported affected families, said: ‘These documents form a significant discovery. I believe there may have been a cover-up over the effect of this drug on pregnant mothers.’

The documents include a letter from Dr William Inman, a UK government medical officer, to Schering stating that women taking the test had a 20 per cent chance of having a baby with deformities.

But he did not tell the manufacturer to withdraw the drug – he merely urged it to take steps to avoid ‘medico-legal’ problems.

Schering, now owned by the German firm Bayer, said it ‘rejects any suggestion’ of a cover-up.

It added that evidence for a link between the tests and deformities was ‘extremely weak’.