Pregnancy, Deafness Link Is Discounted

A long-standing belief that getting pregnant will lead to deafness in women with a hearing defect called otosclerosis is most likely wrong, according to report presented this week at a conference in Florida.

The original idea that pregnancy was dangerous for such women came not from medical research, as most scientists think, but from a decision made by a high-ranking official in Nazi Germany's eugenics program to remove people with genetic defects from the population, said Dr. William H. Lippy, an Ohio physician in private practice who conducted the study.

The key to disproving the link came from his observations of devout Jewish women in Israel, Lippy reported this week at a meeting of the Triological Society, an organization of ear, nose and throat doctors.

The tale is a lesson in how information that "everybody knows to be true" is handed down from one generation of physicians to the next without question, Lippy said. "What I practiced all these years, what many of my colleagues practiced, was wrong."

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