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In addition to the epidemiology, this book deals with the history, teratology, clinical features and prenatal diagnosis (methods, costs and ethics) of two neural-tube defects. There are chapters on the science of epidemiology and on recent work in Canada and Northern Ireland.

There is need for a good book with this title. In the reviewer's opinion, this one fails to present a balanced picture of anencephaly and spina bifida (ASB), largely because the authors have not been able to shake off the all-pervading myth that "multifactorial inheritance" is a testable and useful hypothesis. They vacillate but, in the main, they appear to hold that " the paltry birds of multifactoriality held in the hand, however tenuously, are worth more than that alluring single bird of causality somewhere in the hypothetical bush " (VAISRUB, Journal of the American Medical Association 1979, 241, 830). Professor J. H. EDWARDS, in an important …