thank you, William Pollack

I've learned a lot about pregnancy, birth and human development in the last few months of reading, but the thing that has surprised me most is the severity of Rh disease.  I had heard of this blood type incompatibility before, but now have a very personal motivation to understand it better.

I'm part of the 15% of the population with an Rh-negative blood type.  "Rh" comes from the rhesus monkey where the proteins, which are present in Rh-positive people, were first identified.  When Rh-positive blood mixes with an Rh-negative person's blood, through transfusion or blood-to-blood contact, a severe immune reaction is triggered.  In pregnancy and birth, if an Rh-negative mother's blood mixes with the Rh-positive blood of her fetus, her body produces antibodies that attack the blood cells of the fetus.  This causes anemia and sometimes stillbirth.  It becomes more and more severe with each subsequent pregnancy.

This was a really big deal, killing 10,000 infants a year in the United States.  Thankfully, a medical researcher named William Pollack, in collaboration with researchers at Columbia, invented a vaccine that eliminates invading Rh positive cells.  The vaccine became WHO standard protocol in 1971, has no major side effects, and has nearly eradicated the disease worldwide, saving over 200,000 newborns a year.

I just happened to see that Dr. pollack died last week and wanted to write this little tribute.

We all (should) get a lot of vaccines in our lifetimes, but this one feels much more important to me.  My perception is that while I am unlikely to encounter polio or measles, I am highly likely to have an Rh positive child, so this is one vaccine which will likely be put to the test.