Underwater birth and neonatal respiratory distress: Authors' reply

doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7505.1448

BMJ 2005;330:1448 (18 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7505.1448

Letter

Underwater birth and neonatal respiratory distress

Authors' reply

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—Cluett et al point out that respiratory conditionscan occur after any birth and in the absence of discernibleantenatal fetal compromise. However, we had emphasised datathat excluded other causes of neonatal respiratory distressin our case—namely, the mother was apyrexial, the membraneshad been ruptured less than 18 hours at delivery, the infectionscreen on the infant gave negative results, there was no fetaldistress, and the baby was born vaginally and required no resuscitation.Most importantly, our paediatric radiologist (MS) reported thechest radiograph to show widespread changes consistent withaspiration of birthing pool water. It is implicit in her reportand is also obvious from the figure we included of the chestradiograph that the chest radiograph did not show pneumonia,transient tachypnoea of the newborn, airleak, or any other causeof respiratory distress other than aspiration of birthing poolwater—hence we made the . . . [Full text of this article]