| Summary: | 碩士 === 中山醫學大學 === 醫學研究所 === 102 === Infection during the pregnancy is one of the most common birth defects apart from the drug-, radiation-, pollution-, and genetic-related causes. A variety of pathogens are found capably to transmit vertically to the fetus during the pregnancy. In fact, most of pathogens are difficulty penetrate and successfully colonize onto fetus due to the barrier of placenta. However, some small viral particles and parasites are able to establish infections. For examples, the so-called “TORCH” including Rubella Virus, Cytomegalovirus, Herpes Simplex Virus I & II, Toxoplasma gondii are among those commonly found in pregnancy. Fetal TORCH infections usually associate with central nervous system damaged, as well as multiple-organ failures. Most severe TORCH infections occur at the early pregnancy when fetal cells developments are likely affected. Infections at a later pregnancy stage resulted in an organ developmental problem and organ failure are frequently found. Therefore, TORCH are among the important tests for pre-natal diagnosis to secure healthy babies are born. In Taiwan, there is no solid data regarding the prevalence of TORCH infection. In this study, we collected sera and investigate TORCH antibodies from 2,760 pregnant individuals between January 2011 and December 2013 in two counties in central Taiwan region. Among these results, we found 7 Toxoplasma gondii IgM(+) (0.25%), 24 Rubella Virus IgM(+) (0.87%), and 18 Cytomegalovirus IgM(+) (0.65%). Since there are roughly 210,000 newborns annually, 2 to 3 thousands infections are very likely expected based on our results. In order to prevent medical waste due to the ignorance of these infections occurred in the early pregnancy, we propose to execute sera TORCH assays for every pregnant woman.
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