Pregnant or Not?

There are three standard chemical tests for diagnosing early pregnancy. All depend on the fact that the urine of gravid women contains hormones which affect certain animals when the urine is injected into them. All these tests are about 98% accurate.

This week a new kind of pregnancy test was announced. Dr. Frederick Howard Falls and two colleagues of the University of Illinois College of Medicine, after experiments on 600 pregnant and nonpregnant women, launched it in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The answer comes up in an hour or less (the other tests take from six hours to five days); it is cheaper than the other techniques. Like the others, the Falls test is about 98% reliable.

The test works a good deal like skin-testing for allergy. The test material is colostrum--a thin, watery fluid secreted in the breasts of gravid women. From them colostrum is extracted, mixed with sterile salt solution and a preservative chemical, stored under refrigeration to await use. To make a Falls test, a small amount of the colostrum preparation is injected into a woman's forearm. If she is not pregnant, a reddish weal will appear. If she is pregnant she will not react. Theory is that pregnant women, secreting colostrum of their own, are immune to injections of it from a foreign source.

The colostrum test is valid as early as two weeks after conception. This trigger-quickness is bested only by the ten-day interval of the Friedman rabbit test.

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