A baby, whether a boy or a girl, was a distant dream for a couple last year, but thanks to modern fertilisation techniques their son is 9 days old today.

The little miracle was a landmark development for the Fertility Management Unit (FMU) at the University of the West Indies (UWI), as for the first time in Jamaica, an embryo that was frozen for about a year in liquid nitrogen was thawed and implanted into its mother to grow and be born a healthy baby boy.

Head of the FMU, Dr Joseph Fredrick, in an interview with the Sunday Observer, explained why the procedure was needed at all.

“The husband is 34 years of age and has a low sperm count. There were less than 200,000 in his specimen, and when we looked at a sample under the microscope there were five motile sperm. It was a severe case of male infertility,” said Fredrick.

“We had to use the introcytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) process where sperm was actually injected into eggs to grow embryos. When we implanted a fresh embryo into the mother the first time she did not get pregnant, so we froze the rest and kept them in our embryo bank for when they were ready to try again.”

Last June, the embryos were thawed and the cells allowed to divide again to show that they were alive. They were put into an incubator at body temperature, 37 degrees Celsius, and after a few hours were transferred into the woman’s normal cycle, when she should be ovulating. Three were thawed, two put in and one implanted.

Fredrick noted that the 22-year-old mother had previously given birth, so they placed only two embryos in her womb. For older women he would have placed more.

“Fresh embryos have a 25 per cent take-home-baby rate. Frozen embryos are lower at 15 per cent. We had one woman before. We transferred an embryo that was previously frozen to her womb. It implanted, but she aborted after 20 weeks. In young patients, the implantation rate is very high and we are careful not to put more than two embryos in women who are under 30 years of age, because we want to avoid the risk of triplets.”

According to Dr Fredrick, internationally it is estimated that between 10 and 15 per cent of all couples had fertility problems, and that Jamaica was no exception. He cited reasons for female infertility as tubal disease, endometriosis, irregular ovulating, and cystic ovarian disease. For men, the culprits are usually a low sperm count, a low survival rate of sperm or absence of sperm in the semen, because of a blockage in the vas deferens. He also named Erectile Dysfunction as a factor.

The successful birth from a frozen embryo is a landmark for the team at the FMU, which included Dr Vernon DaCosta and Dr Shaun Wynter; embryologist, Denise Everett; sister-in-charge, Claudette McKenzie; and unit co-ordinator, Yvonne Walters.

Two more women are pregnant with embryos that were frozen and one is due to deliver twins soon.

The FMU, which opened in 2000, took a break in 2002 and resumed in 2003, has been successful in invitro fertilisation and embryo transfer processes. In 2001, they reaped success as their first babies were twins born on March 2, 2001. These babies were conceived using fresh embryos and are Jamaica’s first “test tube” babies.

The work of Dr Fredrick and his team has generated interest, and the FMU team has been getting calls from interested couples in the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas and Bermuda.

For the new father, his son is a joy that had been a long time coming.

“The father is elated,” Dr Fredrick said. “The baby was 3Kg, a normal size and healthy.”

The smile of a first born son is priceless, but a standard procedure starts at US$5,000. Fredrick insisted, however, that this was good value for money. “Our procedure gives a saving to the patient as they pay for one cycle (to remove the eggs) and they have enough for three or four implantations. In the USA they put everything in at one time.”

The first baby born by in vitro fertilisation (IVF) was in the UK in 1978. In 1983, the first embryos were frozen successfully at several research centres across the world. Soon after, at least three countries claimed to have the first baby born from a frozen human embryo.