The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is urgently reminding the public that contact with baby turtles can pose a serious health risk to infants, small children, and adults with impaired immune systems as they can be natural hosts to Salmonella, a group of bacteria that can cause severe illness and death.
Routine infant immunization with pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV7) has caused a 39 percent fall in all-cause pneumonia hospital admission rates for American children under 2, according to an article published in this week?s edition of The Lancet.
The most common cause of infant hospitalization in the United States, respiratory syncytial virus, infects virtually all children by age two. Along with the influenza virus, RSV is a major contributor to the approximately two million infant deaths worldwide caused every year by respiratory infections, according to the World Health Organization.
Each year an estimated 20 million children are born with low birth weight worldwide, more than 95% of them in developing countries.
A study by scientists at the Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies, South Africa, has shown that exclusive breastfeeding can significantly reduce the risk of HIV transmission from mother to child in infants aged under six months when compared to those also given solid foods or replacement feed (i.e. formula milk).
Although newborn babies in rich countries routinely have their hearing tested, the major global health agencies, such as the World Bank and Unicef, have not prioritized funding for newborn hearing tests in poor countries, writes Dr Bolajoko Olusanya (University of Lagos, Nigeria and University College London, UK) in PLoS Medicine.
The next time you are struggling to carry your bags home from the supermarket just remember that this could, in fact, be the reason you are able to walk upright on two legs at all! How we have evolved to walk on two legs remains a fundamental but, as yet, unresolved question for scientists.
Heart problems in children are quite different from those in adults, and four studies presented today at the American College of Cardiology?s 56th Annual Scientific Session look at how pediatric cardiologists take different approaches to better understand and manage cardiovascular disease in this population, including insights into fundamental cardiac mechanisms and testing of new procedures.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom have found that, as for rodents and other nonprimates, prenatal exposure of nonhuman primate African vervet monkeys (Chloroceus aethiops) to glucocorticoids has long-lasting deleterious effects on cardiovascular, metabolic, and neuroendocrine function.
To address the high rate of multiple births resulting from in-vitro-fertilization (IVF), researchers at Yale School of Medicine and McGill University have developed a procedure that estimates the reproductive potential of individual embryos, possibly leading to a decrease in multiple-infant births and a higher success rate in women undergoing IVF.