blue baby

A sort of "blue baby syndrome" can also be caused by Methemoglobinemia^[2][3] . It is believed to be caused by high nitrate contamination in ground water resulting in decreased oxygen carrying capacity of hemoglobin in babies leading to death. The groundwater is thought to be contaminated by leaching of nitrate generated from fertilizer used in agricultural lands and waste dumps.^[4] It may also be related to some pesticides (DDT, PCBs etc), which cause ecotoxicological problems in the food chains of living organisms, increasing BOD, which kills aquatic animals.
Other insults in neonates, such as respiratory distress syndrome, can also produce a "blue baby syndrome," although like methemoglobinemia, these are not structural lesions and are not regarded by most doctors as true "cyanotic lesions."

[edit] Surgery

On November 29, 1944, the Johns Hopkins Hospital was the first to successfully perform an operation to relieve Tetralogy of Fallot.^[5] The syndrome was brought to the attention of surgeon Alfred Blalock and his laboratory assistant Vivien Thomas in 1943 by pediatric cardiologist Helen Taussig, who had treated hundreds of children with Tetralogy of Fallot in her work at Hopkins' Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children. The two men adapted a surgical procedure they had earlier developed for another purpose, involving the anastomosis, or joining, of the subclavian artery to the pulmonary artery, which allowed the blood another chance to become oxygenated. The procedure became known as the Blalock-Taussig shunt, although in recent years the contribution of Vivien Thomas, both experimentally and clinically, has been widely acknowledged.