Spray adhesives and birth defects

To the Editor.— In August 1973, spray adhesives were removed from the market in the United States because of concern that they might be mutagenic or cause birth defects or both. 1 With the cooperation of several geneticists and public health persons, we registered 41 families that had sought reproductive counseling because of a current pregnancy and because of exposure to spray adhesives prior to conception or during the first trimester or both. Of these 41 families, three were lost to follow-up, and there was no pregnancy in two families. From the remaining 36 pregnancies, 33 infants were born without birth defects, two infants were born with birth defects, and one fetus was aborted spontaneously. One of the infants with birth defects had a clubfoot, and the other died in the neonatal period from congenital heart disease. The outcome of this small cohort of pregnancies suggests no unusual occurrence of