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The discovery that a mother’s fever can cause problems for her unborn baby was made by a University of Sydney veterinarian, Professor Marshall J. Edwards, who in the 1970s first noticed hyperthermic cows often miscarried or gave birth to abnormal calves.

His observation led to the understanding that fever is a “tetragen” – something that leads to birth defects or abnormalities in a fetus.

In the midst of Trump’s attack on what he called “woke” science, researchers were shocked to discover that women were considered to be a minority group.Credit: Illustration: Marija Ercegovac

“That was really important, and from there we realised we need to be treating women who had a fever,” says Debra Kennedy, Associate Professor at UNSW’s School of Women’s and Children’s Health. High fever in early pregnancy increases the risk of miscarriage, neural tube defects, cleft palate and heart defects.

That US President Donald Trump has launched an unfounded attack on an easily accessible and safe treatment for fever now directly compromises the health of women and their babies by ignoring decades of evidence.

Acetaminophen or paracetamol, known by the brand name Tylenol in the US and Panadol in Australia, is one of the most widely studied and most-used drugs in the world, yet Trump has branded it as a cause of autism in wilful defiance of researchers who, almost unanimously, agree the drug does no such thing.

The fearmongering claims paraded by Trump and his administration have perpetuated his war on women’s health and failed neurodiverse communities by wrongly........

© Brisbane Times