Entries for January 2009

This latest outbreak of salmonella has even the bug experts scared. That's not just because the outbreak has killed seven people and sickened at least 491 in 43 states. It's because the bacteria are in peanut butter and peanut paste that manufacturers bought by the tanker-load and mixed into hundreds of products on supermarket shelves, from Clif bars to ShopRite peanut butter crackers to Trader Joe's Peanut Butter Chewy Coated & Drizzled Granola bars. Even dog biscuits are on the list. These are products that people tend to keep on the shelf for months. If you're like me, you think that throwing a few granola bars into the kid's backpack is a great idea for a just-in-case snack. Not anymore.

It turns out that salmonella and other lethal bacteria thrive in the typical environment of a packaged granola bar: room temperature with lots of protein. Bacteria are killed if they're heated above 140 degrees, but clearly that didn't happen with the peanut butter coming out of the Peanut Corp. of America plant in Blakely, Ga., which has been identified by the Food and Drug Administration as the source of the outbreak.

The number of kids with antibiotic-resistant infections of the head and neck has jumped alarmingly in the past few years, according to new research. MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, accounted for 28.1 percent of children's head and neck staph infections in 2006, up from 11.8 percent in 2001. Although the rate of MRSA infections has been climbing for years, this jump was so big that the researchers, from Emory University, called it "alarming." They published their study of hospital laboratory reports in the Archives of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery.

Ears were the most likely source of the bad bugs, followed by the nose and sinuses, then the neck. MRSA infections are treatable with antibiotics more powerful than methicillin, but who wants to go that route, particularly with children? I've previously described 4 simple ways to reduce your family's risk from MRSA, based in information from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Here they are again, in short form:

1. Wash hands often. MRSA is spread by skin-to-skin contact, and people rub their noses many times in the course of the day. Cleaner hands means less likelihood of MRSA in the nose.

Autism tops Barack Obama's medical to-do list, according to the new president's website. Whitehouse.gov launched at 12:01 pm yesterday, even before the new president had taken his oath of office on the Capitol's West Front. Autism is the only disorder or disease mentioned explicitly in Obama's 24-point agenda. Heart disease and cancer don't get the call. Neither does diabetes, or other chronic diseases. But there are four hefty bullet points addressing autism. Obama called for:

1. Increased funding for research, treatment, screenings, public awareness and support services for autism spectrum disorders.

2. "Life-long services" for people with autism spectrum disorders, as children and as adults. Many parents struggle to find and pay for screening and treatments for their children, but there is even less coverage and capacity for adults with autism-based impairments

Starting this week, pregnant women in Duplin County, N.C., and Queens, N.Y., will be getting letters and phone calls asking them to be part of the National Children's Study. This first-ever effort, 10 years in the making, will follow thousands of children from the womb to age 20, with the goal of finding the causes of major health problems like asthma, autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, low birth weight, birth defects, and premature birth. In the months and years to come, 103 more areas of the country will be included in this first large-scale, long-term study to investigate environmental factors like pollution and pesticides as possible causes.

"We'll be able to amass information on the environmental causes of these diseases within three to five years," says Philip Landrigan, a principal investigator for the study, based at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. He pioneered research on the health effects of air pollution on children, proving in the 1970s that children could suffer IQ loss and other serious damage from exposure to low levels of lead previously thought safe.

The nation's cardiologists aren't quite ready to start diagnosing children with metabolic syndrome, a group of interrelated risk factors for heart disease, such as high blood sugar and high triglycerides. But parents can act now to make sure their children don't end up with this scary syndrome. That's the message from the American Heart Association, which says it's time for families to work together to live a healthy life.

Parents should be worried, because obesity is the main culprit causing metabolic syndrome, and the huge increases in obesity among children and teenagers are almost certainly setting up our kids for a vastly increased risk of diabetes and heart disease as adults. More than 17 percent of American children ages 6 to 19 are now obese, compared with about 5 percent in 1974. Here's one case where prevention is really the way to go—and under everyone's control.

With the news that a 19-year-old woman died of bird flu in China, it's time to think of how best to be safe, even if this latest case of the virus doesn't spark the long-feared global pandemic.

"We shouldn't be complacent," says Kathy Neuzil, an infectious-disease expert who specializes in flu through her work with the PATH global initiative and as a member of the pandemic flu task force for the Infectious Diseases Society of America. While there haven't been many human cases in the past two years, Neuzil says, the H5N1 flu strain has killed 248 people since it first appeared in 2003 and has decimated wild and domestic birds worldwide. (I've been covering bird flu from the beginning, and though I rarely get rattled by scary bugs, this one gives me the willies.)

The Internet is awash with rumors over the cause of the tragic death of actor John Travolta's 16-year-old son, Jett, who died January 2. I don't want to rehash the arguments over whether Travolta and his wife's belief in Scientology influenced the family's healthcare decisions. But amidst all the to-and-fro stands a startling bit of medical history: Jett, who had chronic health problems including seizures, had been seriously ill with Kawasaki syndrome as a toddler.

Something else for parents to worry about? Doctors who treat children with Kawasaki say it's highly unlikely that the mysterious ailment had anything to do with the teenager's death, because the heart damage typical of the disease happens soon after symptoms start. A 2007 Taiwanese study found that 43 percent of children who were diagnosed 10 days or more after the fever started suffered coronary artery problems, compared with 14 percent of children diagnosed earlier.

Here's a new online resource for parents who want to know the bottom line about the risks of concussion and other sports-related head injuries: MTBIFacts.com.

I cottoned onto it thanks to its creator, Dominic Carone, a neuropsychologist who runs the Neuropsychology Assessment program at SUNY Upstate Medical University. He saw my recent blog post alerting parents to a review article in this month's Pediatrics that spells out the risk of playing hurt. Carone created the site last month to publicize the latest science on traumatic brain injury, an area of medicine that's rife with controversy and misunderstandings.