【《We Chinese in America》Media Editor Tang Zhao, October 17, 2022】Preeclampsia, a little understood complication of pregnancy that each year results in more than 70,000 maternal and 500,000 fetal deaths worldwide. Rates of the illness had been rising steadily in the United States for years, but during the pandemic, the number of cases jumped, according to doctors. No one knows exactly why. (Photo credit: Intercept)

The mystery of preeclampsia cases is part of thegrowing pool of information scientists are sorting through when it comes to the impact of the coronavirus on reproductive health, from a woman’s menstrual cycle and fertility down to possible effects on a baby’s development. Ilhem Messaoudi, a professor of immunology at the University of Kentucky, said she and many of her colleagues have been taken aback by the extent to which pregnancy has been affected by the pandemic. Like many researchers, she had initially thought of covid-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as a respiratory illness and did not expect it to impact reproductive organs. Instead, she and other pregnancy experts have spent the past few years scrambling to understand spikes in maternal complications — first reported anecdotally then verified in several large studies — including an extremely small but nonetheless alarming group of unusual stillbirths. “I was naive,” Messaoudi reflected. “Now I wonder, ‘What else have we been missing?’