Response of the Fetus to Infection

Abstract

My presentation on this subject is drawn from the current veterinary literature, as well as my own research. The papers that you've heard so far today regard the beginning and the end of pregnancy. I want to talk about pregnancy itself, but everything has to have a beginning. I will talk about some of the responses of the individual fetus, but somewhere along the line these responses have to begin. Do we talk about the individual as beginning its life at birth or at fertilization or maybe even going back a little further to the proverbial gleam in the father's eye? The interesting thing about this is that up until a few years ago we thought about the individual's life beginning at birth but we now know that most of the reactions that we see in animals-inflammation, resistance to disease, immune reaction-all begin during uterine life, and as we continue to study this I am amazed at how young the fetus is when we first see some of these reactions. Most of what we are talking about are protective mechanisms, but some are transitory responses that are unusual because of unusual results that occur. I will just take a moment or two to cover these.