A gene previously shown to be involved in the development of type 2 diabetes also predisposes children to having a lower birth weight, a new study has found.
The study, by researchers from The Children’’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, sheds light on a possible genetic influence on how prenatal [...]
Posts Tagged ‘birth’
Diabetes gene predisposes kids to have lower birth weight
July 30th, 2009 |
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Dave Johnson: The Origins Of The Birther Theory
July 27th, 2009 |
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This post originally appeared at Open Left. OK, sit down for this. The root of the “forged Obama birth certificate” idea is that Obama was…
The Progress Report: ‘The Wacko Wing’
July 27th, 2009 |
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by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Ian Millhiser and Nate Carlile To receive The Progress Report in your email inbox everyday,…
Obama Birth Certificate Parody
July 24th, 2009 |
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In response to the posting of this purportedly authentic copy of Obama’s certificate (posted by Nightlight and picked up by Huffington Post):Blogger Rette posted this:(Click for full images).I’m not sure whether or not the first birth certificate is au…
Michael Seitzman: I Want My Country Back…[From That Nigger]
July 24th, 2009 |
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I hear you, lady. And thank you for bravely holding up your birth certificate and tellin’ that Congressman Castle you want your country back! Hell…
Google and Microsoft: Separated at Birth?
July 22nd, 2009 |
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With Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Chrome OS, each company made a move that was more characteristic of the other. Are the commpanies adopting each other’s best or worst habits, and can the enterprise benefit from a Google-Microsoft morph?
– Theres a famous quote from Walt Kelly’s Pogo that goes, quot;We have met the enemy and he is us. quot;
This quote has been jumping to my mind a lot lately as Ive watched the ongoing battle between Microsoft and Google. Thats because Ive been finding it a lot harder lately to tell these two compan…
Simple saliva test can spot women at premature labour risk
July 22nd, 2009 |
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Researchers at University College London and King’’s College London have developed a simple saliva test that may help detect which expectant women are likely to go into premature labour.
Researchers believe that early identification would allow mothers to be given steroids which help in the development of the baby’’s lungs, preventing disability and death.
The study appears [...]
Damages win for S Korea baby swap
July 20th, 2009 |
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A South Korean mother who left hospital with the wrong baby after giving birth more than 16 years ago has won some $56,000 (£34,000) in damages.
The woman was unaware of the hospital’s mistake until last year when she found her daughter’s blood type could not possibly match hers or her husband’s.
Tests proved the girl was not hers, and it was then discovered that a nurse had accidentally swapped the children.
Seoul Central District Court refused a request to see the other girl’s file.
It cited the need to protect personal information.
The woman, who gave birth in a hospital at Guri, Gyeonggi Province, in 1992 wanted to see the medical file to track down her biological daughter.
The court ordered the hospital to pay damages to the mother for mental losses, The Korea Herald reported.
"The hospital bears responsibility for taking adequate care of the newborn babies and to return each one to the right parents," said the court in its ruling.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Kids’ Lower IQ Scores Linked To Prenatal Pollution
July 20th, 2009 |
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CHICAGO — Researchers for the first time have linked air pollution exposure before birth with lower IQ scores in childhood, bolstering evidence that smog may harm the developing brain.
The results are in a study of 249 children of New Y…
Zambia prosecutes editor of Post
July 15th, 2009 |
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An editor at Zambia’s biggest-selling newspaper has been charged with distributing obscene materials relating to a health sector crisis.
The Post sent harrowing images of a woman giving birth in the street to government ministers to highlight the effects of a health sector strike.
In May and June, Zambia’s hospitals and clinics ground to a halt as doctors and nurses went on strike over pay.
An official government spokesman declined to comment on the case.
The trial of the Lusaka-based Post’s female news editor, Chansa Kabwela, is due to start at the beginning of August.
‘Too gruesome to publish’
Pictures of the woman giving birth, to a child which subsequently died, were taken by a family member and handed to the Post.
"Unfortunately the president and his ministers and some of his supporters have chosen to ignore the plight of that woman"
Sam Mujuda
Post deputy editor-in-chief
Nine months pregnant and unable to afford private care, she had gone into labour.
But with her baby emerging feet first, she was turned away from two clinics and then Zambia’s largest hospital.
Sam Mujuda, the Post’s deputy editor-in-chief, described the pictures as "particularly graphic".
"I found these pictures quite gruesome and our decision was that we could not publish these pictures," he said.
"Here was a woman giving birth, it was a breach birth, legs first dangling between the legs of this woman."
The editors’ decision to post copies of the pictures to government ministers to focus their minds on the consequences of the strike did not go down well, the BBC’s Jonah Fisher reports from Zambia.
At a press conference, Zambian President Rupiah Banda condemned the Post for circulating what he called pornography.
Then, this week, the paper’s Ms Kabwela was charged with distributing obscene materials.
"What I see in those pictures is suffering," Sam Mujuda added.
"Suffering of a helpless woman who needed assistance. Unfortunately the president and his ministers and some of his supporters have chosen to ignore the plight of that woman."</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Woman who had twins at 66 dies
July 15th, 2009 |
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Single mother Maria del Carmen Bousada from Spain had IVF treatment in US after lying about age
A Spanish woman believed to have been the world’s oldest new mother when she gave birth at the age of 66 has died, leaving behind twin toddlers, Spanish newspapers have reported.
Maria del Carmen Bousada reportedly died on Saturday aged 69. She had given birth in December 2006 as a single mother after IVF treatment.
At the time, Bousada told an interviewer she had lied about her age to a California fertility clinic. “Yes, I am old of course, but if I live as long as my mum [who died aged 101], imagine, I could even have grandchildren.”
Bousada’s death was reported by the newspapers El Mundo and Diario de Cadiz. Cadiz is the southern province where Bousada lived for her whole life.
Diario de Cadiz quoted her brother, Ricardo Bousada, as confirming her death but refusing to disclose the cause. The newspaper said she had been diagnosed with a tumour shortly after giving birth.
There was no word on who would raise the children, named Pau and Christian. Bousada had once said she would look for a younger man to help her raise them.
In January 2007, she told theNews of the World that she sold her house to raise $59,000 (£36,000) for IVF. “I think everyone should become a mother at the right time for them,” Bousada said in a video of the interview provided to Associated Press Television News.
“Often circumstances put you between a rock and a hard place, and maybe things shouldn’t have been done in the way they were done, but that was the only way to achieve the thing I had always dreamed of, and I did it.”
The retired department store employee said she told the Pacific Fertility Centre in Los Angeles that she was 55, the clinic’s cut-off for treating single women. She said the clinic did not ask her for identification.
Bousada lived with her mother for most of her life in Cadiz. She came up with her plan to have children after her mother died in 2005, she said. Initially she kept it secret from her family, and when she finally told them that she was two months pregnant they thought she was joking.
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World’s oldest mother dies at 69
July 15th, 2009 |
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A Spanish woman who became the world’s oldest new mother when she gave birth in 2006 to twin boys at the age of 66 has died, her family has said.
The brother of Maria del Carmen Bousada de Lara told the paper Diario de Cadiz she passed away on Saturday, aged 69.
It said she had been diagnosed with cancer shortly after giving birth.
In 2007, Ms Bousada de Lara said she had lied about her age to doctors at a fertility clinic in California to get IVF treatment, telling them she was 55.
Ms Bousada de Lara argued that there was no reason to believe she would not have as long a life as her mother, who died at the age of 101. She even joked that she might live to see her grandchildren.
She also insisted that if she died prematurely her sons Christian and Pau, who are now two years old, would never be alone.
"There are lots of young people in our family," she added.
When the twins were born in Barcelona on 29 December 2006, Ms Bousada de Lara was aged 66 years 358 days, 130 days older than Romanian Adriana Iliescu, who gave birth in 2005 to a baby girl.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Kim Cattrall Discovers She Had A Bigamist Granddad
July 11th, 2009 |
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Kim set out to find about him. But her search through birth, marriage and census records reveals that, far from building a new life for himself abroad, as her family had suspected, her grandfather was living just 40 miles away in Manchester, a…
Nanny NCT should leave us alone
The National Childbirth Trust’s misguided advice about swine flu, epidurals and breastfeeding is insulting to women
We women are so irresponsible and selfish. First we refuse to breastfeed. Then we scream out for drug relief during childbirth which, as we all know, doesn’t really hurt that much at all. Now the National Childbirth Trust (NCT) wants us to think about our babies-to-be and delay getting pregnant until the swine flu pandemic is past. No longer is the state trying to nanny us. (Health Secretary Andy Burnham has said we should go about business as usual, including trying to conceive). It’s Nanny NCT that’s telling us – or rather, women – what to do.
The NCT, which organises ante natal classes, has a history of hectoring. Epidurals, they instruct, should be “used sparingly”. Instead, we should try rocking, walking, massage, aromatheraphy, hypnotherapy and something called “visualisation” while pushing. This is despite the fact that, earlier this year, a Swedish study showed that learning relaxation – exactly what happens at every NCT coffee morning up and down the country – does not reduce the need for an epidural. Even the proportion of natural births and emergency Caesareans was the same between those who took long breaths and those who took drugs during birth. But the NCT is interested in dogma, not evidence. They dismissed the Swedish report on the grounds that it “only” surveyed 1000 women.
Now another NCT dogma is being challenged by an expert. This week, Professor Michael Kramer, an adviser to the World Health Organisation and Unicef, has said that much of the evidence used to persuade mothers to breastfeed is either wrong or out of date. New formulations mean that a bottle is as healthy an alternative as a breast. Yet Nanny NCT continues to try and bully us into breastfeeding, insisting a mother’s milk is the counter to a child developing a whole range of conditions, from obesity to asthma, with allergies and heart disease thrown in.
It’s not only insulting to presume that we aren’t sensible enough to make up our own minds about when we get pregnant, how we give birth and if we breastfeed. It’s also dangerous. Such a superstitious approach presumes that if we just do everything Nanny NCT says – get pregnant outside a pandemic, give birth without painkillers, and breast feed for the first six months at least – then our babies will flourish. These are little more than old wives’ tales. Our actions alone cannot determine how our children turn out. They may have less brains, legs and breath than us, and no amount of conception planning or mother’s milk will make the slightest bit of difference. It’s not the mother’s fault if they have a child who has asthma or heart disease.
One of the most terrifying, as well as most wonderful, aspects about childbirth is that it takes us to a place we can’t control. It makes us realise that, however much we may think we can manage and plan, we can’t really. Having children brings it home how serendipitous the world really is. Nanny NCT may parade itself as a supporter of new parents. In fact, it blames them for things they cannot change.
Let’s hope, with mounting evidence against their various mantras, the NCT will keep its misguided advice to the few believers who attend its coffee mornings. It certainly doesn’t make pregnancy and baby rearing any better. It just makes us feel worse.