Our Baby News

When you welcome a new baby into your life, it can be overwhelming. You’ve got a hundred decisions to make…picking the right car seat, the safest toys and the best crib…it can be confusing. But we’re here to help.

The Injury Prevention Program (TIPP) is an AAP effort to create rational infant safety guidelines for parents. You can get more information from your pediatrician or the AAP Web site vww.aap.org  , but here are a few for starters:

• Always leave the crib sides up when baby is inside. Check it each time to make sure the latch has caught. A twenty-pound, vigorous, rested baby can pull himself to stand, pop down the bar, and take a header before you can say “doh!”

• Get rid of any cribs built before 1976. They don’t conform to current safety standards and may have rusty parts that can give way under a baby’s sustained assault.

There are an endless variety of over-the-counter (OTC) cold medicines to treat any combination of symptoms: headache, cough, congestion, fever, et cetera. None of these are for infants, and most tell you to “consult your doctor” if your baby is under 18 to 24 months.

There’s a good reason why. Under a year of age, all cold remedies are prescription only. The lame antihistamines and decongestants are available in teeny doses in special infant preparations (Rondec, Cardec).

Antihistamines sedate babies or paradoxically can make them irritable. They are only marginally effective at eliminating congestion. The same is true for decongestants. These drugs, make babies irritable and speed up their heart.

If these medications work, lucky you! Don’t use them for more than a day or two, since the body develops tolerance to them and readjusts the mucus-making cycle upward to account for the inhibitory effect of the drug.

If s important to know a little about fever in general. First, an ear thermometer is not a simple tool like a ruler or a screwdriver. If s a sensitive machine and needs a little maintenance from time to time. It must be calibrated often to avoid over reporting fever. That is, a temp of 102.5°F may register as 103.9°F or 104.2°F or higher in a uncalibrated thermometer. The opposite is not true: a normal reading (say 98.8°F) won’t be reported as too high. If s most accurate in the normal range, and is more prone to inaccuracy the farther away the temp is from normal.

This is what happens: Your baby’s temp reads 104.5. In a panic, you check everyone and the dog to see if if s working properly. You all get normal temps, so you conclude if s working properly. Wrong: The correct way to confirm baby’s temp is to calibrate the thermometer. Sticking an uncalibrated probe back into the ear only reconfirms the first, erroneous reading.

Don’t stick anything into your baby’s ears smaller than your fingertip. Cleaning the outer ear with a cotton swab is absolutely fine, but don’t put it in the hole, no matter how tempted. The grungy brown wax emerging from within may be the vilest, most offensive substance on this planet, but leave it alone. There is no evidence whatsoever that normal earwax obstructs hearing, and it actually performs a valuable function. It protects against cooties.

Putting a marginally protected stick into your baby’s ear is asking for trouble. A sudden, swift head movement toward the stick could perforate the eardrum, disrupt the normal architecture of the three fine bones in the middle ear, and potentially cause permanent scarring and hearing problems.

Hepatitis B is a nasty critter. It can cause disease ranging from a completely asymptomatic infection to serious hepatitis to liver failure. It can result in a chronic infection that can lead to liver cancer. Yeeeeeeeech!

It is primarily a transfusion and sexually transmitted infection.

The average incubation period—the time from acquiring infection to coming down with symptoms—can last up to three months. It can also be transmitted at birth, or through sharing personal items such as a toothbrush.

This is essentially a disease of poverty (due to the legacy of HIV infection in the 1980s, IV drug use, and STDs) and immigrants (due to high rates of endemic infection in many parts of the world—Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, China, much of the Middle East and Africa). Because of its easy transmission via blood transfusion, it is a disease with tremendous public-health consequences.

Two of the more esoteric-sounding vaccines now being given to children include the Pneumococcus and H flu vaccines.

These two bacteria have, until the 1980s and 1990s, been the most prevalent causes of pneumonia and meningitis.

Hospitalization and IV antibiotics are required when they strike and, in the case of meningitis, can have permanent consequences, such as deafness, paralysis, or mental impairments.

Neither germ caused diseases anywhere near as commonly as polio, rubella, or mumps, but we’ve got them licked just the same.

The H flu vaccine (HIB) has been around since the mid-1980s and has eradicated about one third of all the meningitis cases in this country and essentially all of the epiglottitis.

The vaccine world is moving fast. A year ago, the original tip in this slot trumpeted the release of  rotashield, which protected against a common form of diarrhea. In October, 1999, the vaccine was withdrawn after it was found to cause a serious bowel condition in higher-than-expected numbers.

Instead, we will soon have prevnar, a vaccine that protects against the germ known as pneumococcus. This little beast causes meningitis, pneumonia, and ear infections. It will not eliminate any of them, but it will eradicate the most common bacterial causes.

Be forewarned: with so few bacteria around, the remaining germs causing illness are almost all viruses. Pediatricians just might stop handing out antibiotics so freely as they once did—there’s precious little left for them to go after.

Maybe Grandma and Grandpa remember polio, but we don’t. It was a horrible, paralyzing illness that struck from out of the blue and left children crippled or confined to the iron lung. Jonas Salk developed the first commonly used vaccine, one of the most widely underappreciated miracles of the modern era. Just imagine what it would be like to worry that a mild, flue like illness—low-grade fevers, a sore throat—could end up in lifelong paralysis or ventilator dependence. That was polio.

Sometimes. Obviously not all disorders can be recognised early but some can be detected as soon as the sixteenth week of pregnancy. A test called amniocentesis is done. The developing baby floats in a bath of water, called amniotic fluid (because it is made by the membraneous sac in which the baby lies, and which is called the amnion).

This is not just water, but contains many useful and interesting substances, including a few of the baby’s cells which detach from his body and then float in the water. A hollow needle can be inserted into the amniotic sac, via the wall of the mother’s abdomen and some of the fluid withdrawn. This is a painless procedure, since it is done under local anaesthetic.

The fluid contains cells discarded by the baby and these cells can be ‘cultured’ in the laboratory and examined under a microscope after three weeks. Some non genital abnormalities can be detected, and a particular one is Down’s syndrome (which used to be called mongolism). This shows characteristic changes in the cells’ chromosomes .

In a first pregnancy it is usually between the eighteenth and twentieth weeks of the pregnancy that the baby’s movements are first felt, but often mothers don’t notice them until as late as the twenty-fourth week. They are rather like a ‘trapped butterfly’ – a faint fluttering – and these only gradually become stronger and feel like very definite kicks and nudges.

In a thin woman it is, later on, actually possible to see a bulge appear as the baby shoves a knee outwards or stretches his arms. And some husbands have reported that a particularly vigorous kicker has actually bruised his father’s back when he and his wife lie close together in bed at night.