As remarkable as it may seem in today's world there are actually primitive tribes still in existence who have not yet connected the act of sexual intercourse with the birth of a child nine months later.

 

Equally remarkable is the fact that there are actually physicians providing drugs and therapies (having significant risk to patients) who have not yet connected these acts to the resulting serious disabilities and injuries occurring months or years, later.  The Burton Report^® refers to this phenomenon the "New Guinea Syndrome."

Examples of the New Guinea Syndrome continue to abound in medicine and will continue to exist as long as they are tolerated.  In the 1920s it became the "Standard of Care" to use x-ray radiation to shrink enlarged tonsils and adenoids in children.  It was only many years later that some clinicians, on the basis of health surveys, first recognized the association of this radiation with a high incidence of cancer of the mouth and throat in this population of patients.  

The most striking continuing example of the New Guinea Syndrome has been related to myelography (a radiologic test involving the introduction of a contrast agent into he subarachnoid space for diagnostic purposes) when radioactive solutions and neurotoxic substances such as  iophendylate (i.e. Pantopaque®) were used as the contrast material.  With iophendylate millions of cases of adhesive arachnoiditis were produced throughout the world.  The process was typically initiated by a radiologist who never again saw the patient.  When those patients, who became incapacitated by pain months later, were seen by a examining clinician there was typically no understanding (on the part of the radiologist) that the disease process being encountered had any relationship to the previous myelographic test.  The following is part of a letter received by the Editor prior to Pantopaque^® "falling into disuse."