In 1999, the US Food and Nutrition Board revised the Adequate Intake (AI) for calcium in pregnancy and recommended 1000 mg/day for adult pregnant women and 1300 mg/day for adolescent women (<19 years). Our interest, from the perspective of an international health organization, was to assess if pregnant women globally meet those requirements. This is particularly important because, among the various biological functions of calcium, the potential protective effect of adequate calcium intake in pregnancy on the risk of pre-eclampsia may have major public health implications, pre-eclampsia being one of the most important causes of maternal and perinatal mortality world-wide. Therefore, we conducted a systematic review of studies, published from 1991 to 2004, that assessed calcium dietary intake in pregnant women. In addition, we conducted a multicentre survey of calcium dietary intake during pregnancy among nulliparous women attending antenatal care in developing countries. This survey was conducted before starting a large calcium supplementation multicentre trial: the WHO Calcium Supplementation Trial in Low Calcium Intake Women for the Prevention of Pre-eclampsia. This article presents the results of the systematic review and of the multicentre survey.

Parvoviruses are widespread in nature, with a diversity of virus types affecting many animal species, usually in a species-specific manner. Some members of the parvovirus family give rise to asymptomatic infections but others are highly pathogenic, causing disease not only in adults but also in the young, the newborn and in the fetus. Parvoviruses of animals have for long been regarded as agents of reproductive failure and parvovirus B19 was recognised as a cause of fetal loss in humans in the 1980s. Moreover, following the control of congenital rubella by pre-pubertal and child vaccination, parvovirus B19 infection has emerged as probably the leading cause of viral embryopathy. This review will focus on the laboratory diagnosis of parvovirus B19 infection following exposure in pregnancy. The indications for testing maternal and fetal samples and the interpretation of test results will be discussed and a section is included on clinical management of the infection in pregnancy. The obstetric outcome in pregnant women who seroconvert will be reviewed.

Schmorl is generally credited with being the first to report finding fetal cells in maternal blood. In 1893 he identified trophoblasts in the pulmonary circulation of women who had died of eclampsia. Years later, in 1969, Walnowska identified Y chromosomes in lymphocytes isolated from the blood of pregnant women carrying male fetuses and this was repeated by Herzenberg in 1979 in white blood cells recognised as fetal by their surface HLA-A2 expression. Other sporadic reports followed but not until the 1990's did investigation into harvesting fetal cells from maternal blood begin in earnest. The aim of this article is to review the progress made in isolating and analysing these cells for the purposes of prenatal diagnosis.

Reference to people suffering bouts of severe headache with associated vomiting and visual aura may be found in texts that date back 5000 years but the first clear description of migraine as a distinct clinical entity was provided by Aretaeus of Cappadocia in the second century AD. Today, at least 80% of women experience headaches in adult life and in approximately a quarter of these cases the pain is recurrent and incapacitating. When each episode of headache lasts between 4 and 72 hours and is accompanied by nausea, vomiting, photophobia or phonophobia, the symptoms fulfil the International Headache Society's current definition of the syndrome called migraine, detailed in Table 1.