© Ric Ernst, PNGDr. Kwadwo Asante (center) and executive director Audrey Salahub (right) consult with a patient at the Asante Centre for fetal alchol syndrome in Maple Ridge October 28, 2010.
Vancouver - The children were far too small. It was 1973 and Dr. Kwadwo Asante, one of few pediatricians practising in British Columbia's far north, was seeing a pattern.
Throughout his rounds in northern B.C. and Yukon, the soft-spoken, congenial physician saw children who were not growing properly.
"Failure to thrive" was the medical term he wrote on the charts. What he didn't know was why.
Could it be genetic? Did they have kidney or heart problems? Was it a result of chronic diarrhea?
One preschool boy was so tiny for his age, Asante had him flown to BC Children's Hospital in Vancouver. And it was only then the mystery of the small children of the north was answered.
A Vancouver doctor called Asante to tell him the boy likely had fetal alcohol syndrome. It was one of the first times the term was used to describe the disability affecting children whose
mothers drank alcohol during pregnancy. Similar to how paint stripper works on old furniture, the alcohol consumed by their mothers effectively bubbled away or dissolved their unborn child's brain cells. The result? Brain functions missing in children, leaving them with a lifelong, largely invisible physical disability.The brain damage varied in the children. It depended on the severity, timing and duration of the mother's drinking as well as her age and genetics.
Babies born to mothers who drank in the first trimester, when the unborn child's face is formed, had physical signs, like cleft lips and palates.
On a more precise scale, if a woman drank between days 18 and 21, her children were born with the classic FAS facial characteristics, often referred to as the face of fetal alcohol syndrome.
A "light bulb" went off in Asante's mind. He had seen that face many times.
"They had small eye openings, thin upper lips and a flatness in the groove between the nose and lip," he said.
Asante connected the dots between what the doctor in Vancouver told him about the boy and an article he had just read in a medical journal from Seattle -- one of the first to report on this newly named syndrome.
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