DANGERS OF DRUGS TAKING BEFORE PREGNANCY STRESSED

WOMEN planning to become pregnant are to be warned of the dangers to their
baby of using drugs in a nationwide information campaign.

Expectant drug users are also to be told where and how to access advice and
help throughout their pregnancy and for their new born child.

A midwife liaison service for pregnant drug users set up in two of the
country's biggest maternity hospitals last year already has the potential
to be over run with requests for help.

A third of the 4,040 addicts currently registered at treatment centres in
Dublin are women of child bearing age and there are just two liaison
midwifes one each at the Rotunda and Coombe hospitals to cater for them.

Deirdre McCann, who runs the programme at the Rotunda, warned demand on the
service was likely to increase. "Drug use has increased disproportionately
among women that's beginning to show up in attendances at clinics. Normally
the ratio is 60 40 with women making up the smaller group but at one city
clinic the numbers are now practically equal," she said.

Ms McCann told a conference on Young People and Drugs there had also been a
change in the type of drug use among the women attending the liaison service.

At the launch of the service last March there were no cocaine users but
there were now several. Cocaine is particularly dangerous to pregnancy and
expectant women using the drug are at risk of hypertension, thrombosis and
miscarriage.

Babies born to cocaine using mothers are likely to be underweight and
irritable and risk having heart problems, bone deformities, eye defects and
kidney trouble.

But even minor tranquillisers used in an unprescribed fashion a major
problem in the capital at the moment can harm an unborn child.