The Association for Children Damaged by Hormone Pregnancy Tests is indebted to the persistence of Surrey-based paediatrician Dr Isabel Gal.
In 1967, Dr Gal first suggested in a letter to prestigious scientific journal Nature that Primodos was causing spina bifida in the children of mothers who had taken the test – 11 years before the drug was taken off the market.
Dr Gal, who worked at Queen Mary’s Hospital for Children in Carshalton, Surrey, later told Sky News she had fought a 10-year battle to get the drug removed from the market, but had been stonewalled by every institution, from the Department of Health to the Committee on Safety of Medicines.
Dr Gal died in 2018, aged 92. An obituary is available on The Guardian website.
Following publication of the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review in 2020, Dr Gal’s daughter Kathy wrote to us to express her delight with its conclusions and said that Dr Gal would have been utterly overwhelmed with joy at the result.
