The Prevention of Genetic Disease and Mental Retardation.

Excerpt

Diseases having a significant genetic contribution now comprise an increasingly greater proportion of illnesses seen in medical practice today. This fact has been documented in surveys of in-patient admissions on pediatric and medical wards in teaching and community hospitals in industrialized societies. Medical science itself is in large measure responsible for this phenomenon because: (1) physicians have found ways of prolonging the life of individuals affected with these disorders, permitting them to reproduce; and (2) antibiotic therapy has dramatically reduced the infant and childhood mortality from infectious diseases. It is, therefore, only logical that now we turn our attention to