*Trigger warning: miscarriage, pregnancy loss, birth defects, infants with complex medical needs.

Rubella sounds like a perfume or a baby name. In this episode, two tired moms in medicine talk about how rubella, also called German measles, nearly wrecked an entire generation of pregnancies and why vaccines changed the game for everyone.

In this Funny Medicine episode you get

• What rubella is, how rubella virus spreads, and why symptoms look so mild in most kids

• Why rubella during pregnancy leads to congenital rubella syndrome, CRS, hearing loss, cataracts, heart defects and lifelong disability

• The story of the 1964 to 1965 rubella pandemic in the United States, with 12.5 million infections and tens of thousands of affected pregnancies

• How the MMR vaccine, especially the rubella piece, slashed CRS c ...