Are hospitals making tiny babies sick?
That question troubled Kathy Gerwig, an executive at Kaiser Permanente, the big US healthcare provider, when she visited a Kaiser neonatal intensive care unit in San Francisco back in 2001, to take an inventory of medical equipment including IV tubing, blood bags and feeding tubes. She and her colleagues wanted to find out if they contained a chemical substance known as DEHP, a phthalate used in polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics to make them soft and flexible. Studies of animals had suggested that DEHP could be harmful to a fetus, especially to the reproductive systems in males.
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