Fertility Treatments Spark High Percentage of Multiple Births in Costa Rica
April 27th, 2009 | by admin |The percentage of births of quadruplets and quintuplets recently in Costa Rica far exceeds the world average, a phenomenon that specialists say is due to fertility treatments that couples often undergo in this Central American country.
Over the past six years, Costa Rica has registered a record number – in proportion to the country’s relatively small population – of these two types of multiple births.
According to figures published Sunday by the local daily La Nacion, worldwide the average is for there to be 1 set of quadruplets for every 512,000 births (or 1.95 sets per million births), but in Costa Rica over the period 2003-2008, there were 416,831 births and 11 sets of four babies delivered (or 26.4 sets per million births).
In the case of quintuplets, the natural probability that such a multiple set of births will occur, the daily reported, is 1 in 40 million.
But, between 2003-2008 in Costa Rica, there were 3 sets of quintuplets born even though the country only has 4.5 million people.
The head of neonatal care at state-run Mexico Hospital, Carlos Torres, said that having so many babies at once is not recommended, since it puts at greater risk both the mother’s life as well as those of the children, and it represents an enormous economic cost in terms of the medical care required.
“About 98 percent of the children who are part of a multiple birth are born before nine months and therefore they require specialized medical intervention to (allow them to) finish forming and survive,” he said.
Dr. Gerardo Escalante, a specialist in fertility, said that inadequate use of assisted reproductive techniques could be responsible for the excessive number of multiple births in Costa Rica, and he said that the figures should encourage “national reflection” on the subject.
“A multiple birth is more of a failure of the reproductive technique than a success, because it puts the lives of everyone at risk,” said Escalante, who is a pioneer in Costa Rica in ‘in vitro’ fertilization.
