Local doctor honored at March of Dimes event

According to the March of Dimes, nearly a half-million babies are born too soon every year.

For the past couple of years, the organization has been focusing on a 39- week campaign: Healthy Babies are Worth the Wait.

MOD of North Louisiana Executive Director Kim Ates said, “I am passionate about it because I have twins who were premature.”

This year, the MOD is honoring a local doctor whose career parallels the organization’s mission at the signature chefs auction event 6:30 p.m. Nov. 7 at Horseshoe Casino Riverdome.

Dr. J. Dudley Talbot graduated from Tulane Medical School the year President Franklin Roosevelt started the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. FDR’s personal struggle with polio led him to create the organization. In the 1940s, it became known as the March of Dimes when America’s neighborhoods were invaded by determined women marching door to door, building up a different kind of war chest to fight polio.

Those monies funded research into the vaccines developed by Dr. Jonas Salk and Dr. Albert Sabin that are credited with wiping out the disease. “They eradicated polio,” Ates said. “We are the only national health organization that achieved their mission and then had to redirect.”

Michelle Odom is a member of the MOD Board of Directors. She said the group’s honoring of Talbot comes during the MOD 75th anniversary. She said it’s a fitting tribute given the parallels.

“In 1938, he graduated from Tulane, and that was when the March of Dimes was founded. So there’s this overlapping of their journeys together. It’s historical because he’s 99-years-old, and he can tell us about all of this.”

Ates said Talbot is even more in tune with MOD’s new focus, healthy, full-term babies. “Dr. Talbot is the epitome of what doctors should be doing at this time,” Ates said. He could not believe that doctors are doing elective inductions and C-sections prior to 39 weeks, that doctors are doing it, much less that women are wanting it.”

A MOD 2012 survey of the United States graded Louisiana as failing in the area of premature births. The organization’s national goal is 9.6 percent of births. Louisiana’s percentage was 15.6 percent. According to the report card, health officials have set an interim goal of an 8 percent reduction in the preterm birth rate by 2014. The report stated Louisiana has agreed to the goal.

Ates said the goal is healthy babies, reducing premature births and birth defects through research, education, and increased public awareness that starts with doctors, like Talbot. “We’re celebrating our 75th anniversary and every milestone that we have gone through, accomplished, achieved, instructed, educated, he has been through that in his career.”

Talbot credits Willis-Knighton Health System President and chief executive officer James Elrod with taking positive steps to give babies a better chance. “After Mr. Elrod built Willis-Knighton South, he carved out the whole fourth floor. We’ve got a wonderful premature section there. Dr. Whitton has done a real good job, he and his staff. Every baby has a special cubicle. Mr. Elrod, with the help of the doctors, designed that department fantastically.”

Ates said all three hospital systems in the area have gotten behind the 39-month Campaign, and the state is getting involved.

“We were able to partner with the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals that they would not cover any Medicaid birth prior to 39 weeks that was not covered with rigorous documentation stating it was medically necessary. Being that 80 percent of the babies delivered in Louisiana are on Medicaid,” Ates said, “that was a big help to us.”

Talbot said during his career some technology has been part of the problem. When doctors came to rely on monitors to check fetal heart rate, he said, false readings resulted in C-sections being ordered unnecessarily. “We tried to keep our section rate to not over 5 percent,” Talbot said, “now it’s over 25 percent.”

Ates said some of the blame for the high premature rate rests on mothers. “They’re tired of being pregnant. They want to have it on a certain day. The husband’s leaving to go overseas. We want the natural progression to come back. We want OB-GYNs to be called out at midnight because a woman’s water has broken.”

Talbot said longer is better. “The longer [babies] can stay in the womb, the better they do,” he explained. “Less than 30 weeks, they’re premature and they require a lot more care.”

He should know. When he retired from the baby delivering business in 1980, Talbot, had brought about 6,000 new people into the world.

The event’s theme is “A Stroll Through Time” and will feature culinary chairman, Jason Brady of Wine Country Bistro.

For more information on the event, contact the MOD at 751-9226.

– Joe Todaro