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SIDS and SUID Are on the Rise, With Highest Rates for Black Infants
When Sarah Watkins brought her son home from the hospital in September after a two-week stay in the neonatal intensive care unit, she was nervous. “I was ready to be home, but I was also anxious to not have that extra assistance. That 24/7 support,” she says. Watkins, 38, of St. Louis, says one thing she felt confident about was the baby’s sleeping arrangements. She says the nurses played a video about safe infant sleeping practices and sent her home with tips and pamphlets with QR codes directing her to the National Institutes of Health’s Safe to Sleep resources online.
That website now warns visitors that a funding lapse may leave information outdated and services unavailable until government funding resumes. Recent funding cuts and layoffs at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which oversees the Safe to Sleep campaign, put decades of progress reducing the sleep-related infant death rate at stake.
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS, remains the leading cause of infant death for children one month to one year of age. Since 1994, the NICHD has worked to reduce the risk of sleep-related infant deaths in the U.S., through public education and awareness.
US Stillbirth Rate Exceeds CDC Reports, Says New Study
Stillbirths in the U.S. are more common than previously reported, affecting roughly 1 in 150 pregnancies, and rates are even higher in lower-income areas, according to results from a large study published on Monday. The national average reported by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is 1 in 175 pregnancies.
The CDC’s main source of data, fetal death certificates collected by individual states, is less reliable than the commercial insurance claims data used in the new study, researchers said. “Both of these data sources, the data in our study and the CDC data, have potential flaws, but the main issue is that, regardless of data source, the rate of stillbirths is too high,” said study co-leader Jessica Cohen of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“The US has among the highest rates of stillbirth among all high-income countries, and there has been barely any improvement in stillbirth rates in recent years,” Cohen said.
A West Texas Children’s Clinic Where Vaccine Suspicion Is Encouraged
On a warm October day, Victoria Rodriguez tried to soothe her restless daughter as the girl fidgeted on an examining table of a West Texas children’s clinic. Pia Habersang, the nurse practitioner who runs the clinic, leaned closer. “How is her speech?” she asked.
“She doesn’t talk,” Ms. Rodriguez said, paused and then added, “She is kind of saying ‘no’ more.”
Ms. Rodriguez was insistent that her daughter, diagnosed with autism, needed care from the Pediatric Wellness Center of Amarillo, where parents are greeted with messages professing the side effects of vaccinations and possible connections to autism — connections that medical experts say have been debunked in several medical studies.
Dr. Habersang is a nurse practitioner with a doctorate in child and youth studies from Nova Southeastern University, but is not herself a medical doctor; she runs the center with her husband, who is a physician. She begins her initial medical sessions with new patients’ parents by discussing her concerns about vaccines, the addition of aluminum salts to shots and the rise in autism diagnoses that she insists is connected to vaccination rates.
If a child has a genetic predisposition to autism, she tells parents, early exposure to a vaccine that contains small amounts of aluminum salts, as well as factors like a diet high in saturated fats and sugar, can accelerate toxicity in the body and worsen the condition. “If you look at lists like that, the autism increase, there has to be a reason,” Dr. Habersang said. Victoria Rodriguez knows what the medical consensus is about autism and vaccination, but she insists that her daughter, Jazlynn, developed symptoms in part because of vaccines.
The Mysterious Rise of Cancer Among Young Adults in the Corn Belt
Mackenzie Dryden’s happiest childhood memories are of running barefoot through the sunlit corn fields of her hometown. But when she was diagnosed with cancer 2½ years ago at 18 years old, a disturbing thought began to take hold. Could something in the land she loved have made her sick?
Dryden went to social media for answers, and stumbled upon a deeper mystery: Within just two years, four other recent graduates from her high school — home to only 500 students — had also been diagnosed with advanced cancers. “It’s kind of insane this is happening,” the college senior said in an interview. Dryden’s questioning taps into an unsettling shift in cancer diagnoses in America, with rates for young adults in their 20s, 30s and 40s trending up even as overall cancer rates straight-line highways stretching across the heart of the Midwest, are rising more rapidly than in the country as a whole, a Washington Post data analysis reveals.
The six leading states for corn production — Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana and Kansas — had the same cancer frequency as the rest of the nation for young adults and the overall population when state-level tracking began in 1999. In the 2000s they began to diverge, and since 2015 the states have had a significantly higher cancer rate among those ages 15 to 49. In the latest data from 2022, those states have a rate 5% higher for young adults and 5% higher for the overall population.
Abbott Laboratories, Facing Hundreds of Lawsuits Over Safety of Formula for Premature Babies, Notches a Win in Federal Court
A federal judge handed Abbott Laboratories another win this week in its yearslong battle over the safety of its formulas for babies born prematurely — a decision that could have implications for hundreds of other cases. In the case, Deondrick Brown Sr. and Rebekah Etienne alleged that Abbott’s formula for premature babies was “unreasonably dangerous” and caused their son, Deondrick Brown Jr., to develop the intestinal disease necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) that led to his death.
Their son was born 24 weeks into his mother’s pregnancy, but because his mother was unable to produce breast milk, he was fed fortified donated breast milk for about two months, according to an opinion and order issued Thursday by U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer. Doctors then began transitioning the baby onto Abbott’s cow’s milk-based formula designed for preterm infants, and within days he died from NEC, according to the opinion and order.
On Thursday, Pallmeyer granted Abbott’s motion for summary judgment in the case, siding with the company. The win is Abbott’s third in a row in federal court in Chicago where hundreds of cases over specialized formulas for preterm infants — filed against north suburban-based Abbott and formula maker Mead Johnson — have been consolidated.
