Calls for more foetal alcohol syndrome awareness
The message of ‘no alcohol while pregnant’ may be simple, but health experts say getting people to take it onboard has proved difficult.
FASD is an umbrella term for a group of permanent, life-long and irreversible conditions caused by the effects of alcohol on a foetus, and Foetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) is the most extreme
High rate
François Grobbelaar, founder of FASfacts, said the reason for the high rate of FASD in South Africa is because of a lack of knowledge about the disorder. He said there needed to be more awareness of the condition in rural areas and on farms where “people start drinking at an early age and don’t have limits”.
Leana Olivier CEO of the Foundation for Alcohol Related Research South Africa said women should be aware that FASD is a life-long disease and there is no amount of alcohol that is safe for a pregnant woman to drink.
“Any amount of liquor can cause brain damage or physical development damage to an unborn child. I want to plead with doctors and nurses out there to not tell their patients that one or two glass of wine is fine. It is not fine. If you are pregnant you should stay away from alcohol,” Olivier said.
An edited version of this story was published by Health24.
Author
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Calls for more foetal alcohol syndrome awareness
by SandileMbili, Health-e News
September 5, 2018