imitations can never compete with real ones. This has yet again been proved with two new studies showing that test-tube babies have more chances of having major health problems than normally conceived ones. While more than 90 per cent of babies conceived through assisted reproductive technology (art) are born healthy, the studies indicate that such children have double the risk of having birth defects and low birth weight (www.washingtonpost.com, March 9, 2002).

In the first study, researchers at the University of Western Australia reviewed birth and birth-defect records of 1,138 babies conceived with the help of art and 4,000 children conceived naturally. They found that by the time the infants were a year old, major birth defects were diagnosed in about nine per cent of art children and four per cent kids conceived naturally.

"Their problems ranged from things that are potentially fatal, such as very complex heart defects, to less serious conditions including very large or disfiguring birthmarks,' said Jennifer J Kurinczuk, an epidemiologist working at the University of Leicester in England, the uk .

In the second study, researchers at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, usa , compared 42,463 test-tube babies with 3.4 million infants conceived naturally. The cdc researchers found that about 6.5 per cent of the art babies had low birth weight. Overall, art pregnancies accounted for three per cent of the nation's low birth weight and four per cent of its very low birth weight babies in 1997