Tag Archives: children

Venezuela considers prohibiting bottle feeding for infants

Venezuela's Congress will discuss legislation this week that would prohibit bottle feeding of infants to try to encourage breast feeding and reduce the use of baby formula, said a lawmaker of the ruling Socialist Party. Legislator Odalis Monzon said the proposal would “prohibit all types of baby bottles” as a way to improve children's health. “We want to increase the love (between mother and child) because this has been lost as a result of these transnational companies selling formula,” Monzon said on state television on Thursday. She said the Law for the Promotion and Support for Breast-Feeding, passed in 2007, did not establish any sanctions for using formula. However, she did not say what the sanctions might be if the proposed change to prohibit bottle feeding is passed by Congress, where the Socialist Party has a majority. Monzon said, however, that exceptions would be allowed, such as in the case of the death of a mother, or for women with limited breast milk production, as determined by the health ministry. She did not respond to phone calls seeking details, including how long babies would be breast-fed. Such legislation would likely raise the ire of opposition sympathizers who say the government of the late President Hugo Chavez excessively extended the reach of the state into the lives of private citizens. “People are free to feed their children as they see fit,” said Ingrid Rivero, a 27-year-old mother in Caracas. “My daughter stopped breast feeding after seven months. What can I do?

Sibling bullying is under-recognized, study finds

Across the U.S., parents, educators, doctors and other experts have rallied to protect children from bullies. However, bullying by brothers and sisters is often chalked up to normal sibling behavior. Now a new study finds that sibling aggression, like peer aggression, causes mental distress, which can lead to anger, depression and anxiety in the child who is being targeted. The researchers found that 32 percent of the children and adolescents had experienced one type of sibling aggression during the previous year. Further, the study showed that regardless of whether the aggression was mild or severe, bullied kids had significantly worse mental health than children who were not bullied. “There is a natural emotional intensity to sibling relationships,” said lead author Corinna Jenkins Tucker, an associate professor of family studies at the University of New Hampshire. “There is a lot of love, but also the potential for a lot of conflicts.” More from LiveScience The researchers analyzed information from telephone interviews with nearly 3,600 adolescents ages 10 to 17, and with adult caregivers of children 9 and under. Each youngster had at least one sibling under 18 who was living at home. The data were obtained as part of The National Survey of Children's Exposure to Violence, which documents the incidence and prevalence of youngsters' exposure to violence. During the interviews, the researcher asked if the adolescent or child had been bullied by a sibling during the past year. As the researchers defined it, bullying included physical assault, property victimization (such as forcibly taking something a child was wearing, or destroying something belonging to the child), or psychological aggression (such as name-calling, or telling the child he or she wasn't wanted around). In addition, researchers asked the youngsters if they had experienced anger, depression or anxiety during the previous month. Eight percent of the children interviewd had experienced two or more types of sibling bullying duringthe previous year. Children who were even mildly physically assaulted by a sibling had greater mental distress than adolescents who were not assaulted. However, all the kids were similarly affected by the other types of sibling aggression. Tucker said that parents and other adults often downplay sibling aggression. As a result, it's “under-recognized and under-estimated,” she said. “Our work is showing that in some cases, the mental distress associated with sibling aggression is similar to what we see with peer aggression. It is something to be taken seriously.”  Mark E. Feinberg, a research professor at the Prevention Research Center at Penn State University, said “while our society has been working to eliminate bullying, it has not touched the relationship that is most violent — the sibling relationship.” The findings are “are not news to those of us who have been paying attention to sibling relationships,” but because the study involved a large, nationally representative sample, the findings should focusattention on sibling aggression, said Feinberg, who was not involved with the study. “The question then is, what do we do about it?” he said. “Nobody yet has the answer on how to deal with this problem.” According to Tucker, when parents notice bullying, they should step in. “It is an opportunity for parents to act as a mediator, and teach constructive conflict skills,” she said. Parenting programs, Tucker added, should include discussions about sibling bullying as well. “There is a big push now to stop aggression, particularly between peers, and we are suggesting that these programs include a focus on siblings,” she said. The study is published June 17 in the journal Pediatrics. Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/17/sibling-bullying-is-under-recognized-study-finds/

Boston hospital to offer hand transplants for kids

A Boston hospital is starting the world's first hand transplant program for children, and doctors say it won't be long until face transplants and other radical operations to improve appearance and quality of life are offered to kids, too. The move shows the growing willingness to do transplants to enhance a patient's life rather than to save it as donated hearts, livers and other organs have done in the past. More than 70 hands and at least 20 faces have been transplanted in adults, and doctors say it's clear these operations are safe enough to offer to children in certain cases, too. “We feel that this is justifiable,” Dr. Amir Taghinia said of the pediatric hand program he will lead at Boston Children's Hospital. “Children will potentially benefit even more from this procedure than adults” because they regrow nerves more quickly and have more problems from prosthetic hands, he said. Only one hand transplant is known to have been done in a child - a baby in Malaysia in 2000. Because the donor was a twin who died at birth, her sister did not need to take drugs to prevent rejection. That's the main risk in offering children hand transplants - the immune-suppressing drugs carry side effects and may raise the risk of cancer over the long term. However, one independent expert thinks the gains may be worth it in certain cases. “We understand so much more about immune suppression” that it's less of a risk to put children on it, said Dr. Simon Horslen, medical director of the liver and intestine transplant program at Seattle Children's Hospital. “This is never going to be done as an emergency procedure, so the families will have plenty of opportunity to weigh the options.” Also, a hand can be removed if rejection occurs, and that would not leave the child worse off than before the transplant, Horslen said. Several types of kids might be candidates - those born without hands, children who lose them in accidents and children with infections that wind up requiring damaged hands to be amputated. Quality of life is a key concern for people missing arms and hands - prosthetics for those limbs are not as advanced as those for feet and legs. In December, doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore did a double-arm transplant for former soldier Brendan Marrocco, who lost all four limbs while serving in Iraq. It was the seventh double-hand or double-arm transplant performed in the U.S. For a child missing two hands, “the quality-of-life issues are a big deal,” said Dr. Douglas Diekema of the Center for Pediatric Bioethics at Seattle Children's Hospital and a member of the American Board of Pediatrics' ethics committee. “In terms of how we interact with the social world, it's mostly our face and our hands,” so a transplant “is a reasonable thing to offer a family,” he said. Boston Children's Hospital plans to make its first cases healthy children 10 or older who are missing both hands. “Some of them can't feed themselves, they can't go to the bathroom, someone needs to assist them with almost every activity,” Taghinia said. The hospital also will consider children missing one hand who already are taking immune-suppressing drugs because of transplanted organs, or those with only one hand that doesn't work well. The hospital will cover the cost of the operation and care for three months afterward, then ask insurers to pay for immune suppression and follow-up.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/17/boston-hospital-to-offer-hand-transplants-for-kids/

8 germiest public places

An average adult can touch as many as 30 objects within a minute, including germ-harboring, high-traffic surfaces such as light switches, doorknobs, phone receivers, and remote controls. At home, you do all that you can to keep the germs at bay. But what happens when you step out the door to go to dinner, do some grocery shopping, or visit the doctor's office? …

Experimental vaccine shows promise against TB meningitis

A report on the federally funded research is published online June 11 in the journal PLOS ONE. TB brain infections often cause serious brain damage and death even when recognized and treated promptly, researchers say. This is so because many drugs currently used to treat resistant TB strains cannot cross the so-called brain-blood barrier, which stops pathogens from entering the brain, but also keeps most medicines woefully out of the brain’s reach…