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The smart bet so far has been on the rumour that Kate and William are having a girl, but the Sunday People has stated that Prince Harry is telling people that are close to him that they are going to have a boy. The Prince is said to be very excited about being an uncle and could not keep the secret of the child’s sex. The Duchess of Cambridge and The Duke have kept mum so far about the sex of the child which is due in the middle of July, but Harry appears to be having a tough time keeping his lips sealed. A source stated that Harry is telling everyone that he will soon have a little nephew and is having a tough time keeping it to himself. According to the source, the entire family is excited about the boy and Kate actually was hoping to have a little boy. The source added that they have considered many baby names but they believe that they have finally chosen the right one. Even Harry allegedly does not know the name they have chosen however so it may be some time before anyone does. The source also revealed that everyone in their inner circle also knows that it will be a boy and have been purchasing gifts that all have a boy theme. Officially, the Royal couple has refused to publicly acknowledge what the gender of the child will be. At seven months now, Kate had a slip of a tongue that they seemed to point more to a girl than a boy. However, she bought a Bugaboo pram just a few days afterwards in the colour blue which seemed like an indication to many that she is going to have a boy. Reese Witherspoon is said to be slowly losing friendships as a result of the memory loss that she suffered after she had her youngest child. The actress has two children, Deacon and Ava, from ex-husband Ryan Phillippe and last year she welcomed another child named Tennessee with her current husband Jim Toth. The 37 year old admitted that it can be hard to keep up with three young children and sometimes she has problems keeping up. She said that ever since she had Tennessee she is having problems with her memory and she forgets everything. Reese went on to explain that that she has lost a few friendships because she forgets to respond back to people but it is impossible to keep up with everything. She said that sometimes she feels like a ticker tape is running through her brain as she slowly thinks about the status of every one of her children. The last month has been a bit more hectic for Reese following a brief arrest for disorderly conduct. She was jailed for a few hours after Jim Toth was taken into custody for driving while intoxicated. Despite this fact, Reese knows that it is important that she continues to focus on the positives in her life. For instance, she used to keep her Academy Award hidden but a friend told her that it is important to show off her successes because not every year will be a success and it is important to celebrate the good in one’s life. Outside of making films and juggling family the star also makes some time from here to there to fight for causes that she believes are important such as the right for equal pay and feminism. She explained that even in America women still make less than men and minorities make even less.
The British Heart Foundation estimates that at least a third of the UK’s population aged 11 to 15 years is overweight or obese. The implications are alarming, to say the least. Based on other studies along the same lines, about 80% of that group will be obese by the time they reach adulthood, and subject to all the health problems related to that condition, including heart disease. There is little argument about the presumption that children who grow up eating the ubiquitous fast foods laden with sugar, fat and salt establish an eating pattern that tends to stay with them in later life. Current statistics suggest that if the present trend continues, by 2050 as many as nine out of ten UK adults will be overweight or obese. Health and dietary professionals repeatedly stress the importance of educating children about the ways in which the foods they eat affect their bodies. That sort of education needs to start at home, but schools can play a major role when it comes to influencing a child’s early eating habits. A leading London cardiologist, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, believes that primary schools should be delivering the message about healthy eating habits loud and clear. Dr. Malhotra argues that though the government has set standards for school lunches in maintained schools, there is no regulation on private and non-maintained schools, and of course no regulation at all on what kids bring in packed lunches. On top of that, manufacturers of typical kid’s foods tend to market the ‘yummy’ factor over any health benefits when they advertise where those kids will notice, namely in TV commercials and on supermarket shelves. One London school Malhotra observed has instigated a reward programme for kids who bring a piece of fresh fruit in their packed lunch – and for those who do not bring a package of crisps or a chocolate bar. The reward is only a sticker, but the scheme apparently has a fairly strong impact on the children when it’s combined with information they can understand and appreciate. Schools can invite local health authorities to talk with children on a level that makes sense to them, like explaining how the heart works and what makes it work better in the activities they enjoy. Once they get interested in the topic, kids will inevitably learn more and apply that knowledge to their own behaviour. Judy Hargadon, chief executive of the School Food Trust, said that eating a balanced diet should become the social norm for children, and could if schools provided the right information and parents supported their efforts. Both these professionals suggest that the government should back this concerted effort with stricter regulations on the advertising and packaging of kid’s foods. UK shops are starting to see a need to ration sales of powdered baby milk in recent weeks, all because of an apparent surge in demand from China for baby milk made abroad. Danone is the manufacturer of Cow, Gate and Aptamil powder products and they said that retailers were now placing a limit of two per client in order to prevent individuals from buying baby milk in bulk to resell on the black market. The company also said it was increasing its milk production to meet the export demand. This unofficial export increase to China is now well understood to be the cause of this raise in demand, all because a lot of parents want Western brands to use for their babies. The company has apologized to parents for imposing the limit, but says that most parents buy only one can at a time, so it hopes the impact will be minimal. Even the supermarkets such as Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Asda said they were imposing limits. Chinese made milk has a bad reputation ever since an instance in 2008 when melamine killed six infants because of contamination in milk, and 300,000 became ill, suspected from the same cause. This affects more than just Britain however, with Australia forced to restrict sales earlier this year. Chinese tourists would buy them in bulk and send packs back home or sell them when they went back. Hong Kong authorities also applied restrictions in February to prevent shortages, and were keeping an eye on travelers hoping to stock pile. Now, people are even getting arrested for trying to smuggle milk into mainland China. With the increase in production, Danone said that it was hoping that the UK shortfall would be temporary, and that more supplies were arriving every week. Preschoolers are often diagnosed as possibly developing attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) yet there are things that can be done to help prevent such a problem, like parent behaviour training. It is a well studied element that can greatly affect young minds. These programs are set in order to promote a better relationship between parents and kids, and can bring effective change in discipline and consequences. These techniques usually focus on rewards and non-punitive consequences that kids have to handle should they display disruptive behaviour, something that can be adjusted thanks to training and early intervention for a number of signs like , temper tantrums, impulsive behaviour, hyperactivity and oppositional behaviour. Dr Alice Charach is a neuro-psychiatric doctor as part of a team that studied this type of behaviour at the Hospital for Sick Children of Toronto, and these are some of the behaviours that her team studied. She says that this type of behaviour can be quite effective in young kids who may display some symptoms of ADHD. Ideally, these methods should be employed in children of preschool age, and the results of her studies were published in the April issue of Paediatrics. ADHD in diagnostics can quite often come without any hint of treatment options, but if enough is done early on, this can help the development process of the kid. In order to conduct that study, efforts were done on kids of around six years old where they found over 55 studies linking these initial criteria with an improvement in the result in the kids, where ADHD may be treated through training and medications. They believe that parent behaviour training can be just as good as many of the more modern methods that are used to deal with this issue in children. Dr Charach says that medication should only be used as a last resort after training. The key to healing a particularly viral gut disease which has been fatal to premature babies has been found in amniotic fluid, say doctors who studied the topic. Because of severe inflammation called necrotising enterocolitis, what is typically a normal bodily function can turn deadly and destroy tissues in the gut, leading to organ failure. Now early tests in animals show that stem cells inside amniotic fluid can help heal this problem, according to data published in the journal Gut. These could help prevent some of the damage and increases the chance at survival, which could lead to a higher instance of infant survival. More tests will be needed before it is tried on premature babies, but the data is positive so far. These babies are born too soon and as such may not be ready to deal with some of these problems, and by using stem cells their guts can be prepared in a better way to deal with more types of food. Studies show that up to one in 10 babies that are born prematurely can be susceptible to fatal gut disease. It appears that the cells can have a direct effect calming the inflammation and causing a resident stimulation in the gut so the intestines can be repaired internally. Right now, close to 40% of babies who end up needing an operation do not survive. This is a big problem for many and something that the stem cells can help solve. The Institute of Child Health from the University College London ran the research that looked into this issue, and cells taken from amniotic fluid have shown the best progress levels to combat this issue. While more testing will be needed, the scientists are optimistic to finding a solution. Scientists from Sheffield University have made a new discovery that may help prevent premature births from occurring in the future. Dr. Neil Chapman was the leader of the research team at the medical school and helped to isolate key genes that might cause premature birth to start too early because of inflammation of the womb. He found that these genes get ‘turned off’ incorrectly when the womb becomes inflamed essentially. Therefore, the study took a look at several experimental medication treatments that can help prevent contractions from occurring in the womb by using tissue donations from woman that are pregnant. However, they found that when the chemical was placed into the womb the contractions would still start again even once the drugs had actually stopped. Chapman explained that their research is one major step in the right direction and that they soon hope to figure out some of the unknowns surrounding labour. They have seen that the inflammation of the uterus stops genes that would otherwise prevent labour from starting prematurely. Therefore, their goal is to figure out how to stop the inflammation from occurring or at least how to stop it from affecting the genes so that the womb does not contract and lead to premature births. Chapman also added that premature death is the number one reason that infants die and this is largely because scientists still do not completely understand the intricacies of the physiology and biochemistry of the body. The work that his team has done shows that the experimental drug may help prevent the womb from starting contractions but they have not yet figured out how to prevent the inflammation from occurring. Therefore, they just have to figure out how to stop the genes from being affected. It would appear that the old term ‘population explosion’ won’t be applying to the UK in the near future. According to last week’s report from Rightmove, a large segment of the young married population is being forced to put plans for a family on hold because they simply won’t have room to grow. Those couples who managed to get a foot on the bottom of the housing ladder in the form of small homes, often at least partially financed by the bank of Mum and Dad, are having difficulty in taking the next step. Many of them bought property just before the market slumped drastically, so the equity they hoped would build up during their ownership just didn’t materialize; many have found that selling their first home means taking a loss financially. Of the more than 20,000 respondents surveyed, Rightmove discovered that almost a third of those looking to buy in 2013 are ‘second steppers’ with an average age of 41. The average age of first-time buyers came out to be 30, which indicates that it’s taking longer for young people to become property owners and for first-time owners to move up to larger homes. The situation is worst in what the analysts are calling ‘blackspots’, regions where the percentage of first-time buyers is below 20%; in a healthy market the percentage is more like 40%. Rightmove housing market analyst Miles Shipside observed that six out of eleven regions quality as blackspots. With a shortage of first-time buyers, second-steppers have lost the biggest part of their potential buyer pool, and for the majority, if they can’t sell the first home, they can’t buy a bigger one. However, Shipside noted that if the housing market picks up as a result of the government’s Funding for Lending programme, the stalemate of no buyers, no sales could change. Basically, in order for the second-steppers to make that second step, there will need to be more first-steppers, who in turn will be needing affordable mortgages to get them started. In the US, a baby girl born with HIV seems to have been completely cured following early treatment using standard drug therapy. Doctors say that the child from Mississippi who is now aged two-and-a-half has been on and off treatment for almost a year now and shows no sign of infection. More research needs to be carried out to ascertain the fact that if treatment is rendered to the patient within hours after birth then, it could possibly work for others. If the child continues to remain healthy then, it would be reported as the second reported successful cure for HIV in the world. In as much as this is a successful case of a child who received treatment just a few hours after birth and continues to live disease-free without using HIV medication; this does not mean that we have discovered the Holy Grail. Even though the findings so far are quite encouraging, we still have to wait to see whether the treatment will cause permanent remission. Experts are quick to add that the same kind of treatment may not work for older children who are HIV positive since the virus will have had time to establish. Medical advisors still advise that the best way to prevent HIV is through prevention; with HIV positive expectant mothers being administered with anti-HIV treatment during prenatal care and then proceed to have a Caesarian delivery, which is considered low risk, the mother should remember that they should never breastfeed the child. In this manner, their children have a 98% probability of being HIV negative. During a conference in Atlanta, John Hopkins University’s virologist, Dr. Deborah Persaud made a presentation on her findings saying that it was proof that HIV could be potentially curable in an infant. Six years ago, Timothy Brown was recorded as the first man in history to have completely recovered from HIV. His was cured through a complex treatment for leukaemia which involved the complete destruction of his immune system then afterwards, he received a stem cell transplant from a donor who had a rare genetic mutation capable of resisting HIV infection. In order to improve the way that they currently treat autism, researchers are taking a closer look at symptoms of that may signal a child has autism from as young as six months old. The hope is that by identifying autism while a child is still an infant they can be more effectively helped via constructive development and parenting. b Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Centre professor Katarzyna Chawarska has put together a team to more carefully isolate the link between autism in patients where there is a family history and attention deficits in infants. The results seem to point to a noticeable level of inattentiveness while the children are just six months old. The infants that displayed these traits were later found to be autistic. Chawarska explained that for many years they have been working hard to isolate signals of autism. The idea was to discover what the earliest point in development when an infant starts to show signs that they are going to be autistic. They studied the children by looking for markers that were not present in children that were not found to be autistic. The study utilised vision-tracking technology that looked at 67 at risk infants and a control group of fifty infants. All of the infants were offered auditory, visual, and social stimuli. They were also shown a woman that was doing different things such as playing with toys as she was speaking directly into the face of the camera. The children that were from the high risk group tended to pay less attention to the video and avoided eye contact with the woman versus the children that were in the control group. Charwarska remarked that they are very excited by the way the study turned out because it signifies that at as early as six months children have social features within their visual field that may tip off parents and doctors to the presence of autism. Researchers summarised that children that display attention deficits like the high risk infants that were placed in the study will often time have trouble interacting with the other adults and children in their life including their own parents and siblings. This can be an indicator of future problems. |
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