The Deck at Lavasa

 
In architecture, a deck is a flat surface capable of supporting weight, similar to a floor, but typically constructed outdoors, often elevated from the ground, and usually connected to a building. The term is a generalization of decks as found on ships. The Deck at Lavasa is special. It talks to the clouds & is [...]

Lesbians lose Australian court battle over twins

An Australian couple lost a high-profile medical negligence case against their specialist fertility consultant at the Canberra Fertility Clinic last week. The couple had alleged that Dr Sydney Armellin negligently transferred two embryos rather than one as specifically requested when they received IVF treatment in 2003, thereby causing the birth of an additional baby, and then sought damages in the [...]

The Lavabahn, Cloudscapes & Artichokes of LaVaSa

We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it.
-Anaïs Nin, entry for February 1954, in The Diary of Anaïs Nin
As little [...]

No IVF please, we’re British

An overwhelming majority of infertility patients in the UK said they would contemplate travelling abroad for fertility treatment, according to the first comprehensive study on the strength and motivations behind the fertility tourism industry. Among the 339 infertile patients who responded to an online poll conducted by Infertility Network UK, 76 per cent stated they [...]

ADVANCED MICROSCOPY TO SELECT BEST SPERM FOR IVF

Two independent studies presented at a European fertility meeting this week highlight new techniques for selecting those sperm most likely to result in successful pregnancies following IVF using intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). The first, by Italian scientists, uses high-powered microscopy to choose the healthiest-looking sperm for fertilisation, while the second, by US scientists, uses fluorescence [...]

EMBRYO TEST BOOSTS IVF PREGNANCY RATES

A new test which helps IVF doctors pick the healthiest embryos for transfer may boost pregnancy rates by up to 15 per cent, was unveiled at a European fertility conference last week. The test, which takes just one minute to carry out and will be used alongside standard IVF methods for embryo selection, is due [...]

World’s oldest mother has twins at age of 70

A 70-year-old woman in India is reportedly the world’s oldest woman to give birth, when she had twins last week. The girl and boy babies were delivered one month early by emergency caesarean section but are reportedly alive and well after being transferred to specialist neonatal care at Jaswant Roy Speciality Hospital.
Omkari Panwar and her [...]

Donor Children Emotionally Well

Researchers from the Centre for Family Research at Cambridge University in the UK say that families created by the use of sperm donation, egg donation and surrogacy are doing well, particularly in terms of their psychological well-being.
The data, presented at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, come from the [...]

Rs 9000 IVF CYCLE TO CUT INFERTILITY IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Plans for an affordable and universally accessible IVF programme, which will be rolled out to tackle infertility in developing countries, were announced at a press conference at the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology annual meeting today. Dr Willem Ombelet, who heads up the ESHRE special task force on ‘Infertility and Developing Countries’, said [...]

Frozen is better than fresh when it comes to transplanting embryos in IVF

Danish scientists found babies born after a frozen embryo was thawed and implanted had higher birth weights than those born from fresh embryos.  
The study of over 19,000 babies also found no added risk of birth defects.
A European fertility conference heard frozen embryo babies did better because only the most robust embryos survived the freezing and [...]