Gregg's discovery of congenital rubella

In the first half of 1941 an unusual number of babies with congenital cataracts appeared in Sydney. Norman Gregg (1892 to 1966), an ophthalmologist, was seeing two to three times the number that hereditary causes would explain. A severe epidemic of German measles, or rubella, had struck Australia in 1940. It swept through army training camps, and young men home on leave carried it to their families.

Gregg overheard mothers of affected babies talking about having had German measles while pregnant. He went through the records of children with the condition: of 78 babies with cataracts, 13 of them his own patients, 68 had been exposed to rubella in the womb. He did not examine the babies with a slit lamp, judging that he could not justify an anesthetic long enough for it. On 15 October 1941 he read his paper, Congenital Cataract following German Measles in the Mother, to the Ophthalmological Society of Australia in Melbourne, and it appeared in the society's Transactions. It stressed cataracts and congenital heart disease.

Sydney's popular press reported the paper on a Monday morning. Before lunch two mothers had telephoned him: they had had rubella early in pregnancy, and their children were deaf but had none of the defects he had listed. Gregg went on to publish Further Observations on Congenital Defects in Infants following Maternal Rubella. His findings were praised in Australia, but many of his peers abroad were not convinced at first.

Later studies confirmed his observations. Rubella, long regarded as a mild infection, could cause cataracts and other serious birth defects if a susceptible woman caught it in the first few months of pregnancy. The finding spurred rapid growth in teratology, the study of the causes of birth defects, and offered hope of preventing some of them.