Could a similar campaign prevent stillbirths or sometimes-fatal disorders that hamper babies' ability to metabolize food?

Maybe, but first researchers need to know how often those problems occur and scour medical records to figure out who is at risk and why. That's why the Utah Birth Defect Network is going to start tracking stillbirths and genetic metabolic disorders, just like it monitors disorders such as Down syndrome and spina bifida.

The goal is to trace their prevalence, determine the risk factors and develop prevention programs.

"We'll go out and collect some information from the mother's medical record and the baby's medical record and see if there's any trends going on," said Miland Palmer, the network's surveillance coordinator.

The network got the go-ahead for the project from the Utah Department of Health on Thursday. It likely will start its hunt for clues into the diseases in the fall on a pilot basis. It's seeking up to $120,000 in federal funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Utah researchers have recently been looking into why stillbirths happen, but the project is limited to Salt Lake County. By tracking the fetal deaths - which occur about as often as infant death - throughout the state, the network hopes to find more answers.

"We really have to get a handle on this on a population basis to try and find out what's causing it," said Lorenzo Botto, the network's epidemiologist. "If we don't know, we can't do much about it."

The health department has been screening all newborns for metabolic disorders since 2006. Last year, 34 affected children were identified. All of the disorders are manageable if treated, said Fay Keune, screening manager.

The risk factors are known - two parents with the mutated gene. The network will pursue whether children who die or become severely ill have something in common, whether it's ethnicity, infections, or distance to hospitals.

Botto wants to know: "Are these kids actually doing better now with expanded newborn screening?"

There's evidence the network's monitoring can help. It recently found that women who have had sexually transmitted diseases and urinary tract infections while pregnant are more likely to have babies with an abdominal wall defect that must be corrected with surgery.

And its research helped target a folic acid campaign toward low-income women after it discovered the majority of Utah's neural tube defects occurred among women under 30 who had at least one prior pregnancy.

Now that money for that campaign is gone, preliminary data suggest the defect is on the rise again.

hmay@sltrib.com