"It is important that people should not be afraid of Perganol because of what happened today," Dr. Sergio Stone, director of the UC Irvine Medical Center's division of reproductive endocrinology and infertility, said Tuesday. He said that in his three years of treating 20 to 25 patients a month with Perganol, there had been no multiple births.

If this therapy fails, [Erol Caglarcan] said, treatment can be escalated to the use of Perganol, which is actually a gonadotropin hormone itself that has been extracted from the urine of post-menopausal women. Perganol, which has been produced since 1970, is administered by shots.

It is during the interval between a patient's receiving either Serophene or Perganol and hCG, usually at least one day, that a decision can be made on whether to terminate the therapy for that cycle, a decision that is often based on the number of eggs present, according to Stone of the UCI Medical Center.