Child health news round-up (17-22 February 2010)
Contents:
* Tintin cartoon smokers cost Turkish TV $33,000
* AIDS vaccine effects may wear off, researchers say
* Mom’s diet may alter infant’s allergies
* Diabetes helps explain obesity-birth defect link
* Researchers: Most ‘test tube’ kids are healthy
* Pediatricians urge choking warning labels for food
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Tintin cartoon smokers cost Turkish TV $33,000 Thu Feb 18, 2010 (Reporting by Hamdi Istanbullu and Ayla Jean Yackley; Editing by Jon Boyle)
ISTANBUL (Reuters) – A classic Tintin cartoon in which characters smoked pipes and cigars cost a television station $33,000 (21,099 pounds), after Turkey’s state media regulator fined it for violating an anti-tobacco law that bans smoking on air.
The Higher Board of Radio and Television (RTUK) fined private broadcaster TV8 50,000 lira for airing scenes in November from a Tintin cartoon that showed characters smoking, according to a ruling published on the watchdog’s website.
RTUK fined at least five other television stations for similar offences, its website said. Nurullah Ozturk, a RTUK official, confirmed the fine when reached by telephone.
Turkish television stations usually pixelate images of cigarettes and other forms of smoking in films and series to abide by a 2008 law that makes it illegal to broadcast such scenes.
The government last year extended the ban to smoking in all public buildings, including restaurants and bars. Almost half of Turks aged 15 to 49 smoke, according to a 2007 Gallup survey.
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AIDS vaccine effects may wear off, researchers say Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor (Editing by Eric Walsh)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An AIDS vaccine that appears to have worked at least partly in Thailand may only temporarily protect patients, with the effects starting to wane after a year or so, researchers reported on Thursday.
That may explain why results of the experimental vaccine have been so difficult to interpret, said Dr. Nelson Michael, a colonel at the Walter Reed Army Research Institute of Research in Maryland, who helped lead the trial,
Michael’s team is trying to find out how or why it might have worked. They surprised the world last September when they showed the experimental vaccine cut the risk of infection by 31 percent over three years.
“It is very likely that this vaccine only worked for a short period of time,” Michael said in a telephone interview.
“It is a weak, a modest effect but something that we can build on.”
The vaccine is a combination of Sanofi-Pasteur’s ALVAC canarypox/HIV vaccine and the HIV vaccine AIDSVAX, made by a San Francisco company called VaxGen and now owned by the nonprofit Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases.
Michael told the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in San Francisco that it may be possible to design a trial that will show better whether the vaccine can really help people.
Part of the problem, he said, was that the 16,000 Thai volunteers who tested the vaccine were not at especially high risk of AIDS infection.
He said he would work with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to design trials in Asia or Africa.
According to the United Nations, more than 33 million people are infected with the fatal and incurable virus, with 2.7 million new infections every year.
Even a vaccine that protected for just a year would be useful, Michael said.
“Is that ideal?” No,” Michael said. “But it is true there are vaccines like the flu vaccine where you have to get them every year.”
Within the next few weeks, Michael said studies will also start to try to find clues from the blood of the vaccinated volunteers.
“Everyone wants to know why this worked and what lab measurements we could take that could predict this,” he said.
Results will take roughly a year, he said, but labs all over the world will be looking for so-called correlates — measurements such as antibody levels that will show whether a vaccine has affected the immune system in the desired way.
“It is what I call an all-hands-on-deck exercise,” he said.
The AIDS virus has killed 25 million people since it was identified in the 1980s. Cocktails of drugs can control HIV but there is no cure. In 2007, Merck & Co ended a trial of its vaccine after it was found not to work, and in 2003, AIDSVAX used alone was found to offer no protection, either.
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Mom’s diet may alter infant’s allergies
2010-02-19 (Reuters Health)
SOURCE: Allergy, online January 22, 2010 By Joene Hendry
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Eating lots of vegetables and fruits during pregnancy may lower the chance of having a baby with certain allergies, hint study findings from Japan.
Greater intake of green and yellow vegetables, citrus fruit, and veggies and fruits high in beta carotene (generally those colored red and orange) may lessen the risk of having a baby with eczema (itchy, dry, red patched skin), Dr. Yoshihiro Miyake at Fukuoka University and colleagues found.
Foods high in vitamin E, found in some green vegetables, similarly may lessen the risk of having a wheezy infant, they report in the journal Allergy.
Beta carotene and vitamin E are two of many vegetable and fruit antioxidants thought to benefit health. But prior investigations of maternal antioxidant intake and childhood allergies offered conflicting findings. This area of research “is still developing,” Miyake noted in an email to Reuters Health.
In the current study, Miyake’s team evaluated vegetable and fruit intake during pregnancy of 763 women and their offspring’s early-age eczema or allergic wheeze.
The women were 30 years old on average and about 17 weeks pregnant when they reported personal and medical history. When their babies were between 16 and 24 months old, the women provided birth and breastfeeding history, number of older siblings, and exposure to smoke.
The team found that 21 percent of the youngsters wheezed or had a “whistling in the chest in the last 12 months,” and fewer than 19 percent had eczema.
According to the investigators, moms who ate greater amounts of green and yellow vegetables, citrus fruits, or beta carotene while pregnant were less apt to have an infant with eczema.
For example, after allowing for other eczema risk factors, eczema was more common among infants of moms who ate the least versus the most green and yellow vegetables – 54 and 32 infants, respectively.
Likewise, higher intake of vitamin E during pregnancy was associated a reduced likelihood of having a wheezy infant — a finding that supports previous investigations from the U.S. and U.K.
Boosting intake of green and yellow vegetables, citrus fruits, and antioxidants such as beta-carotene and vitamin E among moms-to-be “deserves further investigation as measures that would possibly be effective in the prevention of allergic disorders in the offspring,” the researchers conclude.
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Diabetes helps explain obesity-birth defect link Amy Norton
SOURCE: Obstetrics & Gynecology, February 2010.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – While some research has suggested that obese women have an increased risk of having a baby with a birth defect, a new study shows that diabetes may at least partly account for the link.
Studies on whether obesity raises the odds of birth anomalies such as spina bifida, cleft palate and heart defects have so far come to conflicting conclusions. One question is whether obesity, per se, is the problem — or whether certain factors associated with obesity are at work.
Type 2 diabetes, which is closely related to obesity, has been linked to a heightened risk of birth defects in a number of studies.
The new study, of nearly 42,000 women who gave birth between 1991 and 2004, found no association between mothers’ obesity and the risk of any major birth defect. However, there was a link seen with diabetes.
Women who’d had diabetes before becoming pregnant showed a nearly four-fold higher risk of having a baby with a birth defect than women without the disorder.
The findings, published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, do not mean that women with diabetes generally have a high risk of having a baby with a birth defect.
The vast majority of babies in the study were born with no congenital defects; across the study period, the rate of any major anomaly was less than 1 percent among all women.
What’s more, past research has shown that well-controlled diabetes carries a lesser risk.
“We have known for some time that women who have pre-gestational diabetes have a reduction in the rate of congenital anomalies with improvement in (blood sugar) control in the pre-conception period and during pregnancy,” Dr. Joseph R. Biggio, Jr., the lead researcher on the current study, told Reuters Health in an email.
A 2007 study, for example, estimated the absolute risk of birth defects according to women’s A1C levels around the time of conception; A1C is a measure of blood sugar control over several months.
It found that women with A1C levels lower than 7 percent — which is generally recommended for people with diabetes — had a 2 percent to 3 percent chance of having a baby with a birth defect. That risk was 6 percent among women with A1C levels of 9 percent, and the two continued to climb in tandem.
Based on that evidence, diabetic women who are thinking about pregnancy should try to optimize their blood sugar control, said Biggio, director of the division of maternal fetal medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
For their study, Biggio and his colleagues analyzed data on 41,902 women who gave birth at their center between 1991 and 2004; the women were largely from the inner-city and the majority were African American. When the researchers separated the data into three five-year periods, they found that maternal obesity, diabetes and birth defects all increased over time.
Between 1991 and 1994, about 0.4 percent of babies were born with a major congenital anomaly, such as a defect of the heart, spine, brain, lungs or digestive system. That rate was just over 0.8 percent between 2000 and 2004.
At the same time, the prevalence of obesity increased from 29 percent to 41 percent, while pre-pregnancy diabetes rose from just over 1 percent of all women to just over 3 percent.
Of women with obesity and diabetes in the 2000-2004 period, diabetes appeared to account for about three-quarters of the birth defect risk.
There are several theories on why diabetes is related to birth defects, Biggio said. Excess blood sugar, he explained, is delivered to the embryo early in pregnancy, and that may end up spurring an overproduction of cell-damaging substances called free radicals. The extra sugar may also result in metabolic byproducts that interfere with signaling mechanisms critical to embryonic development, Biggio noted.
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Researchers: Most ‘test tube’ kids are healthy
AAAS: http://www.aaas.org
RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
SAN DIEGO (AP) – More than 30 years after the world greeted its first “test-tube” baby with a mixture of awe, elation and concern, researchers say they are finding only a few medical differences between these children and kids conceived in the traditional way.
More than 3 million children have been born worldwide as a result of what is called assisted reproductive technology, and injecting sperm into the egg outside the human body now accounts for about 4 percent of live births, researchers reported Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The majority of assisted reproduction children are healthy and normal, according to researchers who have studied them. Some of these children do face an increased risk of birth defects, such as neural tube defects, and of low birth weight, which is associated with obesity, hypertension and Type 2 diabetes later in life, the researchers said.
“Overall, these children do well,” said Andre Van Steirteghem of the Brussels Free University Center for Reproductive Medicine in Belgium. “It is a reassuring message, but we must continue to follow up.”
Carmen Sapienza, a geneticist at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia, noted that few of these test tube children are older than 30, so it’s not known if they will be obese or have hypertension or other health problems at age 50 or older.
Sapienza said researchers found differences in 5 percent to 10 percent of chromosomes between assisted reproduction children and other kids.
What’s not clear is whether these differences result in some way from assisted reproduction techniques or if they stem from other factors, perhaps ones that caused the couple’s infertility in the first place.
Only a small fraction of the assisted reproduction children were outside the normal range of gene expression, Sapienza reported. “However, because some of the genes found to be affected are involved in the development of fat tissue and the metabolism of glucose, it will be interesting to monitor these children, long term to determine whether they have higher rates of obesity or diabetes.”
“There are genetic causes of infertility that you can bypass now,” Van Steirteghem said. “But this may mean that the next generation will be infertile, and that is something that all clinics should mention.”
One factor in low birth weight may be that in many cases assisted fertility results in multiple births, which tend to be early and of lower weight.
“We must reduce the epidemic of multiple births,” Van Steirteghem said, noting that in Sweden the rate had been cut from around 30 percent in the early 1990s to about 5 percent today.
In the United States, the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology reported that the use of single-embryo transfers is increasing, and the frequency of triplet births is down to below 2 percent.
Sapienza noted that women seeking assisted reproduction tend to be older than those who conceive naturally, but said that had been controlled for in the studies comparing the two groups of children.
Dolores J. Lamb of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston urged more testing of males for the reason for infertility.
“There are correctable causes of male infertility and a couple can then have children the natural way,” she said. Also, infertility can be the first symptom of diseases such as testicular cancer, Lamb said.
As of 2008, the most recent data available, the United States reported that 361 clinics did 140,795 treatment cycles leading to the birth of 56,790 babies.
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Pediatricians urge choking warning labels for food
LINDSEY TANNER
AAP: http://www.aap.org
CDC: http://tinyurl.com/chokingfacts
Joan Stavros Adler sits in her home Thursday, Feb. 18, 2010, in Warren, N.J., as she holds a photograph of her son Eric Stavros Adler, who choked to death on a piece of hot dog nine years ago at age four. Nine years later, some food makers including Oscar Mayer have added warning labels about choking, but not nearly enough, says Joan Stavros Adler. (AP Photo/Mel Evans) CHICAGO (AP) – When 4-year-old Eric Stavros Adler choked to death on a piece of hot dog, his anguished mother never dreamed that the popular kids’ food could be so dangerous.
Some food makers including Oscar Mayer have warning labels about choking, but not nearly enough, says Joan Stavros Adler, Eric’s mom.
The American Academy of Pediatrics agrees. The nation’s largest pediatricians group is calling for sweeping changes in the way food is designed and labeled to minimize children’s chances for choking.
Choking kills more than 100 U.S. children 14 years or younger each year and thousands more – 15,000 in 2001 – are treated in emergency rooms. Food, including candy and gum, is among the leading culprits, along with items like coins and balloons. Of the 141 choking deaths in kids in 2006, 61 were food-related.
Surveillance systems lack detailed information about food choking incidents, which are thought to be underreported but remain a significant and under-appreciated problem, said Dr. Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
Smith is lead author of a new policy report from the pediatrics academy that seeks to make choking prevention a priority for government and food makers. The report was released Monday in the journal Pediatrics.
Doctors say high-risk foods, including hot dogs, raw carrots, grapes and apples – should be cut into pea-sized pieces for small children to reduce chances of choking. Some say other risky foods, including hard candies, popcorn, peanuts and marshmallows, shouldn’t be given to young children at all.
Federal law requires choking warning labels on certain toys including small balls, balloons and games with small parts. Unless food makers voluntarily put more warning labels on high-risk foods, there should be a similar mandate for food, the pediatrics academy says.
Adler, a Warren, N.J. attorney who pushed for more warning labels after her son died in 2001, says she hopes the academy’s efforts will work. Several efforts to pass federal legislation for labels have failed in Congress.
The group also urges the Food and Drug Administration to work with other government agencies to establish a nationwide food-related choking reporting system; and to recall foods linked with choking.
The academy says the food industry should avoid shapes and sizes that pose choking risks.
Something as simple as making lollipops flat like a silver dollar instead of round like a pingpong ball can make a big difference, said Bruce Silverglade, legal affairs director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which also has lobbied for more attention to choking prevention.
Grocery Manufacturers Association spokesman Scott Openshaw declined to say whether food makers would consider warning labels or new designs, but said making parents aware of choking dangers is key to keeping kids safe.
Openshaw said the industry would continue working with the FDA and USDA “to ensure that our products are as safe as possible.”
At the FDA, spokeswoman Rita Chappelle said the agency will review the academy’s analysis and recommendations. She said the FDA also would continue consulting with the Consumer Product Safety Commission on assessing choking hazards associated with food and take action on a case-by-case basis.
Adler considered herself educated about children’s safety. Her son had eaten hot dogs before without any problem.
Hot dogs are “almost as American as apple pie,” she said. “You really don’t know how horrible it can be.”
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