Campaigning in Florida on Sunday, Republican candidate Newt Gingrich called for a closer look into the practices of the fertility care sector, questioning clinics who discard extra embryos or save them for use in stem cell research, which he opposes (source: Washington Post).

Regulating the fertility industry is a common topic within the field.  In fact, we reported on the the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) back in June, which oversees fertility clinic protocols in the UK, and discussed the possibility of such standards expanding internationally.  In the US, the fertility care sector is self-regulated, with authorities like ASRM and SART leading the discussions and implementation on studies within the field.

While Gingrich does have a point concerning the seemingly wasteful practice of disposing embryos that go unused, he is not well educated on the current trends within the field of in vitro fertilization.  At ASRM’s annual meeting in October, the reproductive society, along with SART, called upon the fertility industry to widen their practice of single embryo transfers (SET), exemplify the industry’s move to safer and more cost effective IVF practices.

Not only has New Hope Fertility Center been a longtime advocate of SET, but also of minimally invasive in vitro fertilization techniques, like Mini-IVF™ and Natural Cycle IVF.  The aforementioned protocols customize IVF care for each patient to ensure our fertility treatments use less medication and ovarian stimulation to ensure we’re treating our patient with the most holistic approach possible.  All of these practices, along with fertility preservation and oocyte freezing, encourage less wasteful IVF practices, proving that Gingrich is misinformed on the fertility industry’s ability self-regulate, considering such minimal stimulation protocols have been around for nearly 10 years.

For more on our Mini-IVF™, Natural Cycle IVF, and other customized IVF protocols, please visit us online.

They seem to have an app for everything these days. This is an interesting one that has been around since 2009, called MeFertil. More information can be found on their website (http://www.mefertil.com/), but the quick version is that this iPhone app will allow you to track, predict and monitor your own body’s fertility from your iPhone based patterns of your body temperature.

Their website explains that:

“Whether you are trying to get pregnant or looking for a natural, hormone-free contraceptive method, charting your basal body temperature lets you get to know your body and monitor your fertility. MeFertil allows you to keep track of your fertility information in the most convenient way — on your iPhone.”

For $4.99 you can purchase the app from the iTunes store (link on their website) and the following video explains a little bit about how it works.

A variety of other apps can also be found here (http://contraception.about.com/od/naturalmethods/tp/fertility_apps.htm), if you are looking to track your fertility patterns in your phone. The article lists 10 different alternatives (all apps for the iPhone) that range from free to $10 that will, in one way or another, help you track your cycles and monitory your fertility.

A quality lab starts with a powerful air handling system so that procedures and research can be conducted in a controlled and uncontaminated environment. New Hope has perhaps the largest and most powerful air filtration system, which handles both air cooling and purification to provide optimal clean air pressure in our lab facilities. The schematic below outlines how our system works.

1) Air is taken into the system from the outside and guided along an insulated path toward our main air handling system.

2) Air is funneled into an initial triple-filter process to remove the bulk of impurities in the air.

3) Air is passed to a machine with custom-designed quad-filtration, harnessing the power of a 737 jet engine to completely purify the air and cool it to optimal temperatures.

4) Optimally temperate and pure air is let out of the system to circulate around the rest of the lab.

Construction on the insulated paths that brings air into our powerful system:

Triple filter and custom-designed quad-filtration systems:

Conduits that pump air to the rest of the lab: