Birth Weights Fell From 1990 to 2005
January 22, 2010
The Washington Post
By Lauran Neergaard
U.S. newborns are arriving a little smaller, says puzzling new Harvard research that can’t explain why. Fatter mothers tend to produce heavier babies, and obesity is soaring. Yet the study of nearly 37 million births shows newborns were a bit lighter in 2005 than in 1990, ending a half-century of rising birth weights.
The change isn’t big: The average birth weight of full-term babies is just under 7 1/2 pounds, a drop of about 1.8 ounces, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.
That’s surprising considering doctor warnings about 9-pound, or bigger, babies. So the researchers double-checked.
The proportion born large for their gestational age dropped about 2 percent, which is good.
“What physicians are responding to is that the bigger babies are getting bigger,” said lead researcher Dr. Emily Oken of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. Plus, “babies are still bigger than they were 30, 40, 50 years ago. It’s just the trend seems to have flattened or reversed itself.”
That’s particularly true for women at lowest risk for too-small babies: White, well-educated, married non-smokers who got early prenatal care. Still, their babies, on average, weighed 2.8 ounces less over the study period.
Babies born too big are at increased risk of obesity and diabetes later in life. On the other hand, babies born too small may require intensive care right away and also be at risk for later chronic diseases. The proportion of babies small for their gestational age did increase slightly, by 1 percent, Oken said.
Moreover, babies’ length at birth suggests even full-term pregnancies are 2.5 days shorter than they used to be. That can’t account for all the weight change, and Oken couldn’t find a full explanation from the birth certificates she studied.
Oken excluded premature babies, as well as twins or other multiples, from her study. (Obese mothers also are at higher risk of having a preemie.) Yes, there are more scheduled cesarean sections or induced labors now, but her analysis concluded that wasn’t to blame.
But that’s not clear as induction often isn’t listed on birth certificates, and the study found a drop in babies born at 40 or 41 weeks gestation, noted Dr. Joann Petrini, an adviser to the March of Dimes.
Regardless, it’s too soon know what this drop means for babies but “we should keep vigilant” about any decline among the smallest newborns, Petrini said.
The study uses the most recent data available from official U.S. birth certificates.
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Toxins Affect Baby Still in Womb
November 17, 2009
Sphere.com
By Andrew Schneider
It is one of the worst nightmares for a mother-to-be: She’s poisoning the baby in her belly, and there is little she can do about it.
Now new research out Tuesday has put hard numbers to those fears, showing that chemicals from everyday products contaminate women’s bodies, and that their children enter the world already exposed to known toxics.
Nine women from California, Oregon and Washington participated in the first-of-its-kind study and had blood and urine samples taken during their second trimester of pregnancy.
The results showed that even in the womb, children aren’t safe from known toxins. The researchers found 13 toxic chemicals in the bio-fluids of the pregnant women. Their report showed that:
• Bisphenol A, used to make polycarbonate plastic and the lining for food cans, was found in the urine of each woman. An artificial estrogen, it has been shown to be harmful to fetal development. In adults, low-level exposure to BPA can cause decreased sperm production, early onset of puberty, chromosome damage in female ovaries, and a variety of behavioral changes.
• Every test subject had at least two and as many as four perfluorinated compounds in her blood. These “Teflon chemicals” are used to create stain-protection products and non-stick cookware and are classified as a likely human carcinogen; in tests on laboratory animals, they have been shown to cause liver, thyroid, pancreatic, testicular and mammary glad tumors.
• Mercury, known to harm brain development, was in the blood of every woman in the study.
• Breakdown products – phthalate monoesters – of at least four phthalates were in the urine of all nine women. Used as plasticizers and fragrance carriers in numerous consumer products, phthalates are linked to reproductive problems and asthma.
The report further noted that research has proven that toxic chemical exposure has been linked to serious health problems like asthma, childhood cancers, diabetes, infertility and learning disabilities. “Yet the degree to which children are exposed to toxic chemicals before they enter the world is still being discovered.”
The Environmental Protection Agency and scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have repeatedly shown that exposure to toxic chemicals before birth and during infancy have the most serious and irreversible consequences.
However, the report does not offer a correlation between the levels of the chemicals found in the mothers and any health problems their newborns were expected to encounter.
“We cannot say with certainty whether these particular babies were harmed by the toxic exposures in the womb,” Schreder said in an interview late Monday. But “we do know that they were exposed during the very most vulnerable time in their lives to chemicals associated with cancer, learning disabilities and infertility.”
Most of the mothers were stunned by the results of the testing.
“I was surprised. The levels were much higher than I expected them to be,” said Alex Rosenstein, a Realtor from Issaquah, Wash. “And this is just from living what I consider to be a normal life.”
Amy Ellings, a public health nutritionist from Olympia, said: “The government’s role is to protect the public from hazards like these. The FDA should be much more active in keeping these persistent chemicals out of our food and packaging.”
To that end, the groups that produced the report, echoing calls from other public health and environmental activists across the country, say that immediate steps must be taken to eliminate the use of persistent toxic chemicals — those that build up in our bodies or are passed on to the next generation. They also want manufacturers to create consumer products using only chemicals fully tested for safety.
Congress has called for a full revamping of the Toxic Substances Control Act, the law that attempts to control the manufacturing of hazardous chemicals in this country. At recent House and Senate hearings on the EPA law, lawmakers heard testimony stating that out of 80,000 chemicals believed to be in use today, only 200 (including most of the compounds found in the pregnant women) had ever been comprehensively tested for health hazards.
For the West Coast researchers, their findings only underscore how little information the public has on toxic contamination before birth.
“Our study cannot answer these very important questions,” Schreder said. “But it opens a window to view the serious threats faced before entering the world — threats that could affect health and well-being for a lifetime.”
BPA and Male Sexual Dysfunction
November 12, 2009
ABC News
By Joseph Brownstein
While environmental groups have sounded the alarm about the presence of bisphenol-A, or BPA, in products such as infant formula, baby bottles and other plastics, a new study provides some of the first evidence that the chemical can be harmful to humans, linking it to sexual dysfunction in men in high doses.
Researchers looked at 550 factory workers in China, some of whom were exposed to BPA as part of their job, and found that men who worked with BPA were four times more likely than their counterparts who did not work with the chemical to report some level of sexual dysfunction.
“The study certainly provides the human evidence to confirm animal studies, but one study is not going to answer any questions,” said Dr. De-kun Li, the study’s lead author and a reproductive and perinatal epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente’s Division of Research in Oakland, Calif.
Li noted that while BPA’s presence has been confirmed in a number of consumer products, all studies before now had only shown harm in nonhuman populations.
“Up to this point, it’s largely, basically animal studies,” said Li, explaining that little has been done about BPA because of a lack of studies in people.
“There has been no human studies, at least in the context of the male reproductive system, so this has been dismissed by some critics,” he said of the potential harms BPA may pose.
But Li acknowledged that the current study will likely do little to change policy, since the levels of BPA were much higher than those encountered by the average person in his or her daily life. The average worker exposed to BPA had levels roughly 50 times higher than the average person.
“At this point … we don’t know the safety of the lower level,” he said, but noted that people do not need to worry too much. “We don’t have to be alarmed and go crazy.”
In the study, 15.5 percent of men exposed to BPA complained of erectile dysfunction more than half of the time, while only 4.4 percent of men not exposed to BPA had the same complaint. Meanwhile, 13.9 percent of men with BPA exposure on the job complained of difficulty ejaculating, while only 2.5 percent of men without the on-the-job BPA exposure had the same complaint.
While previous reports on BPA have relied heavily on animal studies, none have promoted a ban on the substance.
The National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health, considers BPA to be a substance of “some concern” — the third level of a five-part scale ranging from “serious concern” to “negligible concern.”
“There are insufficient data from studies in humans to reach a conclusion on reproductive or developmental hazards presented by current exposures to BPA, but there is limited evidence of developmental changes occurring in some animal studies at doses that are experienced by humans. It is uncertain if similar changes would occur in humans, but the possibility of adverse health effects cannot be dismissed,” the agency writes about BPA in its factsheet.
It is unclear exactly how BPA would cause sexual dysfunction, according to Dr. Michele Marcus, a professor and interim chair in the department of epidemiology and environmental health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. One possible explanation, she said, is that BPA, a known endocrine disruptor, can mimic estrogen and block some effects of testosterone.
Click here for the full report
Hospital-Acquired Superbug Infections Soar in Newborn Babies
July 10, 2009
Natural News
by Sherry Baker
It’s scary enough to have a newborn baby in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) because he or she is premature or has health problems. But now there’s reason to worry that many NICUs, places that are supposed to be dedicated to healing and protecting the youngest and most fragile of babies, are actually dangerous environments for neonates. According to a new study just published in The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, superbug infections — specifically antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections — in US NICUs increased over 300 percent in less than ten years.
Researchers Dr. Fernanda C. Lessa and colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used a national database on hospital-acquired infections and analyzed data voluntarily reported by NICUs between the years of 1995 and 2004. In all, the study involved information collected on nearly 5.9 million patient-days in 149 NICUs across the country.
In newborns, infections that occur during the first three days of life are most often acquired during labor and delivery. On the other hand, late-onset infections, defined as infections that developed more than three days after a child was born, are known to be primarily transmitted by parents, doctors, nurses and other health care personnel. The investigators focused on late-onset infections and found that out of about 4,400 Staph infections with antibiotic resistance, 23 percent were found to be the result of a MRSA superbug.
From 1995 to 2004, the rate of late-onset MRSA infections soared from less than one for every 10,000 hospital days to three infections per 10,000 hospital days — an enormous increase of 308 percent. The types of MRSA infections were not found to change during the years studied. About 30 percent involved bloodstream infections. Other frequent kinds of MRSA infections that were identified included pneumonia and eye infections (conjunctivitis).
For some reason, the steepest rise in MRSA infections occurred after 2002. While the tiniest babies with extremely low birth weights of 1,000 grams (about 35 ounces) had the sharpest increase in MRSA infections, the superbug infection rate actually rose in all birth weight groups.
The ever increasing rate of superbugs has become a worldwide public health problem, with Staph bacteria developing resistance to commonly used antibiotics. MRSA infections have increasingly been found within communities and not just in hospitals. However, in the new study the Staph strains found in NICUs were clearly in the class of superbugs responsible for hospital-acquired infections, not those which have been reported in the non-medical community setting.
So what’s the bottom line result of the study? According to researchers Dr. Fernanda C. Lessa and colleagues at the CDC there is clearly a need for healthcare workers to follow routine infection control steps that are already well-known to be effective in preventing the spreading of MRSA infections. They aren’t high tech chemicals or vaccines, either. Instead, the most important is simple hand washing.
As reported earlier in Natural News, one approach to fighting superbugs in hospitals has already backfired. A study showed that instead of killing potentially dangerous infections, disinfectant wipes may actually spread drug-resistant and sometimes deadly bacteria.
Click here for the full report and links from NaturalNews.com
