PREGNANT women may one day be able to pop a pill to stop alcohol harming their baby, now that researchers have confirmed how ethanol disrupts a fetus’s development.
A team from Harvard Medical School and the Veterans Administration Boston Healthcare System in Massachusetts recently found that, ironically, one form of alcohol can prevent the neurological damage caused by ethanol in mice. This alcohol, called octanol, is toxic, so no one is suggesting that mothers-to-be should use this strange “hair of the dog” treatment to counteract the effects of drinking. But in mouse brains, they showed that octanol blocks ethanol’s effect…
