DiversityNursing Blog

 Daphne Sashin

Her premature baby had been born with his right arm tangled in amniotic bands. At a week old, doctors amputated his dead forearm and hand. They were afraid his body would be become infected and he would die. Falardeau mourned her boy's missing arm for years but, in time, embraced her son as he was. 

Wyatt also learned to adapt. They tried a couple of prosthetics when he was younger and each time the toddler abandoned the false limb within months. 

"His main interest was to create a shocking response from onlookers by pulling it off in the grocery store," Falardeau wrote on CNN iReport. In truth, she had been more concerned about getting him therapy for his autism-related delays -- the limb difference was secondary.

So when a friend shared a story from the "Today Show" with Wyatt in mind, about a team of University of Central Florida (UCF) students and graduates that made an electronic arm for 6-year-old Pring using a three-dimensional printer on campus, Falardeau was defensive. 

"He doesn't need this," she thought. 

Her fifth-grader had a different reaction: "I want one of these robot arms!" Falardeau remembers Wyatt telling her and her husband. "I could ride a bike! I might even be able to paddle a kayak!" 

There were other things the 12-year-old boy said he would do if he had two hands. A proper somersault. Clap with two hands. Dance with a pretty girl with one hand on her back and the other leading. Stuff she hadn't really thought about but he clearly had.

Falardeau got in touch with the Orlando students through E-Nable, an online volunteer organization started by Rochester Institute of Technology research scientist Jon Schull to match people who have 3-D printers with children in need of hands and arms. The organization creates and shares bionic arm designs for free download at EnablingTheFuture.org that can be assembled for as little as $20 to $50. Middle and high school student groups and Girl and Boy Scout troops are among those donating their time and materials to assemble limbs for kids and give them to recipients for free.

The UCF team, which operates a nonprofit called Limbitless Solutions, is special because it's the only group in the 3-D volunteer network making electronic arms. Most 3-D arms are mechanical, which presents a challenge for children without elbows. With mechanical arms, the child opens and closes their hand by bending their elbow. The students came up with the idea for an electronic arm with a muscle sensor that allows the child to open and close their hand by flexing their bicep.

"It's really just a step-by-step process of solving problems. The first problem we solved was: how do we make the hand move electronically? And then: how do we attach this arm to a child?" said sophomore Tyler Petresky. "It's just one problem after another we keep solving. That's what engineering is all about." 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates about 1,500 babies in the United States are born with upper limb deformities each year. Comprehensive statistics aren't available for the number of children with amputations, such as Wyatt. 

The UCF project started when Albert Manero, an engineering doctoral student, heard a story on the radio about one of the inventors of the 3-D printed hand. He got involved with E-Nable and met Alex, a local boy teased because of his missing arm, and set about designing a robotic replacement. They gave it to Alex for free. 

"My mother taught us that we're supposed to help change the world," Manero said at the time."We're supposed to help make it better." 

The students were blown away by what happened after that. The "Today Show" and other national news outlets featured stories about Alex and Manero, and then they got international attention. Families in more than 25 countries have asked the UCF students to help their children. In February, Microsoft highlighted the team in a social media campaign celebrating students using technology to change the world.

Each electronic limb takes about 30 to 50 hours to make and assemble. The students use the printer in the school's manufacturing lab and cover the cost of materials -- about $350 -- through donations.

Petresky got involved with the design of Pring's hand because Manero knew he was good with electronics. 

"He bribed me with some pulled pork sandwiches. I went over to his house and helped him out with electronics," he said. "I found out he was working on an arm, and I thought that was the coolest thing in the world."

Eventually Manero moved to Germany for a Fulbright scholarship and left Petresky in charge of running the operations in Orlando.

Petresky says they ask every family about the child's favorite color, superhero and interests, so the new limb can "not just be a piece of plastic ... but be a part of them." 

As they've designed the bionics, they've learned that kids don't necessarily want to blend in. Children have requested colorful designs inspired by superheroes, Disney's "Frozen," and in Wyatt's case, the blue-skinned men from "Blue Man Group." For Christmas, the group upgraded Alex's plain vanilla white arm to a new one resembling Optimus Prime from "Transformers."

"We quickly found out this is much less about fitting in and feeling normal, and much more about expressing yourself," Petresky said. "There's a large aspect of being artistic and being creative."

The team has made electronic arms for five children and are working with three more kids including Wyatt. He traveled with his mom to UCF last week and practiced flexing his muscle to make the hand open and close.

He expects to get fitted with his new arm later this month.

His mom, Cynthia, was most excited about seeing Wyatt being celebrated for who he is.

"The adoration of college students was an affirmation that money can't buy. He was wrapped in the joy of leading and advising students on how to help children like himself," she wrote in her iReport. "Wyatt felt like he was making a difference for himself and other children."

As they got ready to leave the campus, her son told her he can't wait to see what he will accomplish with his new arm. And someday, he said, he wants to go to UCF and help other kids like him.

Source: www.cnn.com

By SYDNEY LUPKIN

A court will determine whether a 17-year-old girl, under something called the "mature minor doctrine," can be forced to undergo chemotherapy after she refused treatment for her cancer.

How do you feel about this?

The case will go to the Connecticut Supreme court this week to determine whether the teen, identified in court papers as Cassandra, has "the fundamental right to have a say about what goes on with your [her] body," attorney Michael Taylor, who represents the teen's mother, told ABC News. Taylor was appointed by the public defender's office, and Cassandra has her own court-appointed lawyer, but they've filed joint appeals.

Cassandra was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma in September, but decided she didn't want to complete the prescribed treatment, according to a court summary. Her mother supported this decision, but the Department of Children and Families stepped in and ordered her mother to comply with the doctor's treatment recommendation.

"It's really for all the reasons you might imagine," said Taylor, adding that he couldn't go into more detail.

Although chemotherapy is a drug that destroys cancer cells, its side effects include hair loss, nausea, pain and fertility changes, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Cassandra underwent two chemotherapy treatments in November and then ran away from home and refused to continue treatments, according to the court summary.

A court hearing ensued in which Cassandra's doctors testified, and she was removed from her mother's home and placed in state custody so that the state could make medical decisions for her.

She has been has been living at Connecticut Children's Medical Center and forced to undergo chemotherapy for about three weeks.

The Hartford Courant reported that Cassandra has an 80 to 85 percent chance of surviving her cancer if she continues with her chemotherapy.

The state Department of Children and Families issued the following statement:

"When experts -- such as the several physicians involved in this case -- tell us with certainty that a child will die as a result of leaving a decision up to a parent, then the Department has a responsibility to take action. Even if the decision might result in criticism, we have an obligation to protect the life of the child when there is consensus among the medical experts that action is required. Much of the improvements in Connecticut's child welfare system have come from working with families voluntarily to realize solutions to family challenges. Unfortunately that can't happen in every situation, especially when the life of a child is at stake."

"No one is disputing that it's very serious," Taylor said. He said there's "a good chance" Cassandra could survive her cancer with treatment, and "there's a good chance she could die if she doesn't. None of us disagree about that."

Taylor said they're trying to argue that because Cassandra is competent, she should be allowed to make this decision for herself through something called the "mature minor doctrine," which has been adopted in Illinois and a few other states but rejected in Texas. The doctrine holds that some children are mature enough to make key life decisions for themselves.

Source: http://abcnews.go.com

By MELENA RYZIK

Artists, it’s fair to say, usually don’t know much about bacteria. Vik Muniz is an exception. Mr. Muniz, the Brazilian-born photographer known for his unorthodox materials, has been working with the M.I.T. bioengineer and designer Tal Danino on a series of trompe l’oeil images of microscopic organisms: cancer cells, healthy cells and bacteria.

At first glance, they look like ornate and colorful patterns. In reality, they represent teeming, living things. Among his latest: a pink print that could pass for floral wallpaper. But it’s made up of liver cells infected with the Vaccinia virus, which is used to make the smallpox vaccine.

“Normally, patterns are soothing structures,” Mr. Muniz said, “and all of a sudden, there’s a lot of drama.”

The work now has another meaning. It will be used in a new online campaign, The Art of Saving a Life, sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The intent is to promote vaccination just in time for an international effort to raise funds to inoculate millions, especially in poor nations.

The campaign, to be released online on Wednesday, is the first time that the foundation has commissioned artists in the service of a cause. The global roster includes photographers (Annie Leibovitz, Sebastião Salgado, Mary Ellen Mark); writers (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie); filmmakers (Luc Jacquet, director of the documentary “March of the Penguins”); and bands (Playing for Change).

The intent is that their work will spread virally — in the digital sense — and be shared on social media with the hashtag #VaccinesWork to inspire a dialogue and donations.

“We want to get the buzz and the conversation going, because it’s easy to take these important lifesaving tools for granted,” said Dr. Christopher Elias, president of the global development program at the Gates Foundation. Art, the foundation hopes, will serve as a reminder to people “who aren’t going to read the editorial in Science,” Dr. Elias said. If the program is successful, he said, it could serve as a model for other Gates Foundation projects.

The idea came from Christine McNab, a consultant to the foundation. In brainstorming new ways to promote vaccines, she considered “what makes me cry, what makes me think,” she said. “It’s films, it’s books, it’s galleries.”

Ms. McNab and her team invited the artists in and suggested which diseases or issues to address. But they had no control over what was created. Some artists were paid a small fee to cover expenses; some retained their copyright, and others donated their work.

Ms. Leibovitz snapped a black-and-white portrait of people involved in vaccine development. Fatoumata Diabaté, a photographer from Mali, captured the last phase of trials for an Ebola vaccine. The German painter Thomas Ganter paid tribute to the little-sung medical aides who administer the shots, with his oil on canvas of “The Unknown Health Worker.”

The project is timed to lead up to a Jan. 27 meeting of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, an international public-private partnership in Berlin. Some images will be displayed at the conference, which aims to raise $ 7.5 billion from donors for Gavi’s next phase of development. Separately, the Gates Foundation has funded many immunization-related grants, at a cost of millions — far greater, a spokeswoman said, than the budget for the art initiative, which she would not disclose.

As the project developed in the last year, the anti-vaccination movement, in the United States and other Western countries, only gained steam. Though the programs that the Art of Saving a Life supports are targeted elsewhere, “in some ways what we’re hoping for is not just a broader debate about vaccination and immunization, but a more informed debate,” Dr. Elias said.

Countering the anti-vaccination rhetoric was part of the reason that Alexia Sinclair, a photographer from Australia, participated, she said. “I have a young daughter, and it’s quite a hot topic here,” she said, adding that she thought that producing a work of art “allows the conversation to happen in a clearer way.”

After learning that the Chinese characters for smallpox mean “heavenly flowers” — because the pustules bloom on the body, and the sufferers eventually die — Ms. Sinclair, who makes historically-inspired tableaus, created a scene of an 18th-century doctor administering a vaccination, surrounded by grass and blossoms. It brings a fashion-y aesthetic to an ugly disease. “I wanted to create something that looked at smallpox, but did it in a way that didn’t repulse people,” she said.

In an era when viewers are image-saturated, the campaign’s success, and how to measure it, are an open question. “We’ll look at the metrics,” Dr. Elias said. But, he added, the project has already proved valuable inside the Gates Foundation, as a new perspective on old problems.

“The phenomenal response” from artists, he said, “suggests that we have tapped a set of interests and voices that we perhaps should’ve been paying attention to sooner.”

Source: www.nytimes.com

By Carolyn Gregoire

Having a family pet can be beneficial for child development in a number of ways, including keeping kids active and promoting empathy, self-esteem and a sense of responsibility. But dogs may be particularly beneficial for kids with autism, acting as a "social lubricant" that helps them build assertiveness and confidence in their interactions with others, according to new research from the University of Missouri. 

The researchers surveyed 70 families with autistic children between the ages of eight and 18, all of whom were patients at the MU Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders. Nearly 70 percent of the participating families had dogs, half had cats, and some owned other pets including fish, rodents, rabbits, reptiles and birds. 

The study's lead author Gretchen Carlisle, a research fellow at the University of Missouri, observed that autistic children are were likely to engage socially in social situations where pets were present. While previous research has focused specially on the ways that dogs benefit the development of autistic children, Carlisle found that pets of any type were beneficial for the childrens' social skills.

"When I compared the social skills of children with autism who lived with dogs to those who did not, the children with dogs appeared to have greater social skills," Carlisle said in a statement. "More significantly, however, the data revealed that children with any kind of pet in the home reported being more likely to engage in behaviors such as introducing themselves, asking for information or responding to other people's questions. These kinds of social skills typically are difficult for kids with autism, but this study showed children's assertiveness was greater if they lived with a pet."

Carlisle observed the strongest attachments between the children and small dogs, although parents also reported strong attachments between their children and other pets, such as cats and rabbits. 

“Dogs are good for some kids with autism but might not be the best option for every child,” Carlisle said. “Kids with autism are highly individual and unique, so some other animals may provide just as much benefit as dogs. Though parents may assume having dogs are best to help their children, my data show greater social skills for children with autism who live in homes with any type of pet.”

Carlisle's research joins a body of work demonstrating the benefits of animal interaction among autistic children. A 2013 review of studies found that specially trained dogs, horses and other animals can facilitate increased social interaction and improved communication among autistic children, as well as decreased stress and problem behavior. 

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

By DENNIS THOMPSON

Chickenpox befell Angelina Jolie this week, preventing the actress-turned-director from attending the premiere of her new film.

Meanwhile, an outbreak of mumps has hit the National Hockey League, sidelining more than a dozen players and two referees.

These are considered kids' diseases. Most adults have vivid, fretful childhood memories of standing in line to get vaccinations that they expected to provide lifetime protection.

Why, then, are these prominent adults -- and scores of others -- coming down with these infections?

Mainly, it comes down to two factors, experts say.

Vaccination rates have declined among children in some parts of the United States, increasing everyone's risk of exposure to virulent diseases like chickenpox, measles, mumps and whooping cough, said Dr. Aaron Glatt, a spokesman for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

"These vaccines are not perfect," said Glatt, who's also executive vice president of Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Centre, N.Y. "If you don't have a perfect vaccine and you couple that with a less-than-ideal number of people getting it, then if one person gets it then it's more likely to spread to others."

On top of that, even adults who got their shots as kids are at risk of contracting these diseases once exposed to them, because the protection provided by childhood vaccinations can fade over time.

"You can be vaccinated for something and have antibodies that wane over time or disappear entirely," said Dr. Len Horovitz, an internist and lung specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. "You can have intermittent immunity, or no immunity."

America's public health defense against infectious diseases is built on a concept called "herd immunity," Glatt explained. If enough people are vaccinated against diseases like chickenpox, influenza, mumps and whooping cough, then even those who aren't vaccinated benefit because those who are immune can't spread the disease.

Skepticism over the effectiveness and safety of vaccines has caused vaccine rates to decline in some parts of the country, Horovitz and Glatt said. In those locations, adults with waning or imperfect immunity could fall prey to childhood infectious diseases, particularly if there's an outbreak.

"There is less vaccination going on than there was previously," Glatt said. "These childhood diseases have not gone away, and there is a strong anti-vaccine lobby that plays a role in people's decision to have their children vaccinated."

Since the early 1980s, there has been an overall increasing trend of whooping cough in the United States, said Angela Jiles, a spokeswoman for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Between Jan. 1 and Aug. 16 of this year, the CDC received reports of 17,325 cases of whooping cough, a 30 percent increase from the same time period in 2013 and the most cases seen in six decades, Jiles said.

California is experiencing its worst outbreak of whooping cough in seven decades.

There also have been more reported mumps cases in the United States this year, due to some larger outbreaks, according to the CDC. A reported 1,078 people have contracted mumps in 2014, compared with 438 the year before. In 2006 -- the worst year in recent history -- there were 6,584 cases of mumps, largely due to outbreaks on college campuses, according to the CDC.

No one has said how Jolie might have contracted chickenpox, but many of the NHL players appear to have gotten mumps from each other, despite efforts by the hockey league to get players vaccinated.

A single dose of mumps vaccine is about 80 percent effective, and two doses is about 90 percent effective, Amy Parker Fiebelkorn, an epidemiologist with the CDC's measles, mumps, rubella and polio team, told The New York Times.

"There is no vaccine that's 100 percent effective," Fiebelkorn said. "There is some margin for fully vaccinated individuals to still be infected with mumps if they're exposed to the virus."

Unfortunately, adults who contract these diseases are in for a rougher ride than children. They are more likely to develop serious complications, and are at higher risk of death, Glatt and Horovitz said.

These viruses also can increase a person's risk of future illness. For example, chickenpox patients like Jolie have a lifetime risk of shingles, a disease that can cause terrible rashes and intense nerve pain. The chickenpox virus hides in deep reservoirs inside the human body, and then emerges later in life to cause shingles.

Concerned adults can ask their doctor for a blood test that will check their antibodies and see if they remain immune to these infectious diseases, Horovitz said.

"It's something that could be done in the course of your annual exam. It takes no more than an extra tube or two of blood," the same as regular checks for blood sugar and cholesterol, he said. "It would be particularly important for people with chronic medical conditions or who do a lot of foreign travel where these diseases are running rampant."

People also can talk with their doctor about vaccinations that are recommended for adults. For example, the CDC recommends that adults get a booster shot every 10 years for tetanus, diphtheria and whooping cough, as well as an annual flu shot.

Source: www.cbsnews.com

By John Gever

Not all children with severe brain injuries need to be monitored for subclinical seizures, researchers said here, which means that resources can be focused on those at the highest risk.

Victims of abuse, those younger than 2, and those with bleeding within the brain rather than only in the epidural compartment are the pediatric ICU patients most likely to show significant seizure activity that should be detected and treated, said Rajsekar Rajaraman, MD, of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).

A separate study by many of the same investigators also found that, in a broader range of pediatric brain injury cases, risk of seizures could be predicted with "fair-to-good" accuracy on the basis of clinical characteristics that would be recorded routinely at admission.

Both studies were reported at the American Epilepsy Society's annual meeting here.

A senior author on both studies, Nicholas Abend, MD, of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said at an AES press briefing that identifying and treating seizures is important in the pediatric ICU. When seizures are extremely frequent or long-lasting -- and these can easily go without detection in hospitalized children who are unconscious or lethargic -- they significantly increase the likelihood of poor short- and long-term outcomes.

Such seizures can only be detected via continuous EEG monitoring, Abend explained, which also requires interpretation from trained electroneurologists.

Another investigator in the studies, UCLA's Jason Lerner, MD, noted that children may appear to be napping peacefully while actually undergoing continuous seizures.

Although it would be desirable to perform intense monitoring on all pediatric cases involving head trauma, that is not feasible at most centers, Abend said. He said the field could benefit from risk-stratification models that would allow the care team to track only those patients at the highest risk for damaging subclinical seizures.

Such models, he added, could be tailored to meet the needs of individual centers on the basis of their patient mix, staffing, and other factors.

In a platform session at AES, Rajaraman described one approach to developing such a model. He and colleagues collected data on 135 consecutive pediatric patients (ranging in age from infant to late adolescent) with traumatic brain injury who were treated in ICUs at UCLA and at Children's Hospital of Colorado in Denver. These children had continuous EEG monitoring for detecting subclinical seizures.

They found that all such seizures occurred in children younger than 2 and in those with intradural bleeding, and that the vast majority also involved abusive head trauma. Rajaraman and colleagues then sought to validate these associations in a separate cohort of 44 pediatric ICU patients with head injuries treated at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The same patterns were seen.

Across both cohorts, 81% of those with subclinical seizures were determined to have been victims of abusive head trauma, whereas the prevalence of such trauma in all the patients was 25%. Abend said it was uncertain why abusive trauma should be such a strong predictor of these seizures, but speculated that "shaken baby syndrome" -- the most common form of abuse of infants and toddlers -- may produce fundamentally different injuries in the brain compared with falls and car accidents.

Also, such abuse is often chronic, such that the episode that brings a child to the hospital is only the latest in a series of abusive incidents.

The other study, led by Abend, was aimed at producing a predictive model yielding a risk index score that pediatric centers could use to identify critically ill children who could benefit the most from continuous EEG monitoring. It was based on clinical information to which the attending neurologist would have ready access: age, seizure etiology, presence of clinical seizures prior to beginning continuous EEG, initial EEG background category, and interictal discharge category.

Data to design the model were drawn from a database of 336 patients from 11 centers, and then tested against a separate validation dataset of 222 patients treated at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Normalized scores in the model could range from 0 to 1.0, and Abend and colleagues examined the sensitivity and specificity of various cutoffs. When set at 0.10 in the validation cohort, sensitivity was 86% but sensitivity was only 58% -- the high sensitivity meant that 43% of patients would be identified as candidates for continuous monitoring. At the other end, a cutoff of 0.45 reversed the sensitivity and specificity percentages to 19% and 97%, respectively, such that only 5% of patients would be assigned to monitoring.

Abend said the beauty of this approach is that an individual center could choose its own optimal cutoff depending on the resources it has available to monitor multiple patients at one time. A well-equipped and staffed ICU could thus opt for high sensitivity whereas one with more limited resources could be more restrictive.

Source: www.medpagetoday.com

By Linda Carroll

As Jill Koziol turned away from her 8-month-old daughter to check on her toddler, the unthinkable happened. In a fraction of a second little Cate pulled herself up against the laundry hamper, grabbed a detergent pod and popped it into her mouth. 

Koziol heard a gagging sound, whipped around and was horrified to see the remains of the pod on the floor and Cate in obvious distress. 

"The next few moments were very chaotic with a screaming child, me crying and screaming to poison control to be heard over Cate's cries," the 34-year-old New Yorker said.

Within minutes Cate was vomiting and the Koziols were in an ambulance racing to the hospital.

Cate Koziol is hardly alone in her run-in with a detergent pod. A study published on Monday in Pediatrics finds that in 2012 and 2013 17,230 children under age 6 got into trouble with detergent pods. Most — nearly 80 percent — of the children were reported to have ingested a pod. Nearly two-thirds of the children were between 1 and 2 years old.

“The severity of these exposures varies,” said study coauthor Dr. Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. “Sometimes the chemicals get into the eyes, sometimes they are swallowed. And if they are swallowed, they can cause severe burns to the esophagus and the stomach.”

It shouldn’t be surprising that most of the problems involved 1- and 2-year-old kids putting pods into their mouths, Smith said.

“This is the age group where they explore the environment with their mouths,” he explained.

A big part of the problem is that the chemicals in the pods are more dangerous than those in traditional laundry detergents.

“I’ve been treating children for over 30 years in emergency departments,” Smith said. “And for decades if a child came in with a laundry detergent exposure it was usually no big deal. But these are different. They have strong concentrated chemicals in them. And that’s why it’s so important for parents to understand the dangers associated with their use.”

Smith and his colleagues found that among children exposed to the packets, about half were managed at home and 35 percent were treated and released from a health care facility. One child died.

“The concern we have is that in about 700 of these children — that’s a child every day in this country — they had to be admitted to the hospital,” Smith said, adding that some ended up in pediatric intensive care units either in a coma or unable to breathe without the help of mechanical ventilation.

Andrea Gielen, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy, hopes the new findings will be a wake up call for parents.  

“I think it is definitely intended to alert parents to a hazardous household product that they need to make sure is tucked away from where young children can access — much like other dangerous household products, said Gielen, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

In a statement the American Cleaning Institute said, “ACI and its member companies have directly engaged parents and caregivers, as well as poison control centers, pediatricians and other medical professionals, educators and social service providers in alerting them to the potential for childhood accidents involving these products.”

A recent survey by the institute suggests that many parents are unaware of the dangers. While 70% of those surveyed said they store household cleaners — such as dishwashing detergent and glass and toilet cleaners — safely and securely, just 34 percent reported properly storing their laundry pods in a cabinet or a cabinet with a lock, the ACI found. More worrisome, one out of six people admitted to taking no safety precautions at all when it came to storing laundry pods.

That wasn’t the case in the Koziol home. In the minutes before Cate got into trouble with one, Jill Koziol had taken a single pod down and set it on the family’s hamper to get everything ready for her husband to take to their apartment’s laundry room.

The Koziols’ experience is “a perfect example of how these things can happen in the blink of an eye,” Gielen said.

But Gielen said the onus isn’t just on parents. The new study should sound the alarm for product designers, too. “When you are designing a new product you need to be thinking about the most vulnerable part of the population and how it will interact with the product. In this case, it is kids,” she said

When the Koziols arrived at the emergency room, doctors decided to keep Cate there for observation. And it was a good thing they did. Within a couple of hours the little girl was wheezing and struggling to breathe. Her doctors decided to intubate her and Cate spent the next two days in the pediatric intensive care unit.

The whole experience was frightening, but Cate pulled through unscathed.

“Cate is back to normal, though mommy may never quite recover from the ordeal,” Koziol said.

Have you or someone you know dealt with a child who ate a laundry pod? If so, please share your experience.

Source: www.today.com

By JESSICA FIRGER

When Jackson Small began having seizures at 7, his parents hoped and assumed at least one of the many epilepsy drugs on the market would be enough to get things under control. But one seizure quickly spiraled to as many as 30 a day.

"He would stop in his tracks and not be aware of what was going on for 20 or 30 seconds or so," his mother Shana Small told CBS News. Jackson was eventually diagnosed with juvenile myoclonic epilepsy, a type of epilepsy characterized by brief but often frequent muscle jerking or twitching.

But a number of medications typically prescribed to patients with this type of epilepsy were not effective. And so the quest to help Jackson gain control over his seizures led the family from their home in Orlando, Florida, to the office of a registered dietician at the NYU Langone Comprehensive Epilepsy Center in New York City.

They were there to discuss the medical benefits of heavy cream, mayonnaise, eggs, sausage, bacon and butter.

A lot of butter.

The plan was to treat Jackson with a diet that is heavy in fat, low in protein and includes almost no carbohydrates. It's known as the ketogenic diet and has long been in the arsenal of last-resort options for patients with epilepsy who are unresponsive to medication. Doctors may recommend a patient go on this special diet after unsuccessfully trying two or three prescriptions.

The diet works by putting the body in a "fasting" state, known as ketosis. "When we're fasting the body needs to find fuel so our body will break down fat storage and break down their own fat and enter a state of ketosis," Courtney Glick, the registered dietician who coordinated and fine-tuned Jackson's diet plan, told CBS News. "But with this diet, instead of breaking down the body's fat, the body breaks down dietary fat."

The ketogenic diet consists of as much as 90 percent fat. Some patients who feel they can't make such an extreme change adopt a modified Atkins diet, which is between 65 and 70 percent fat. It can be nearly as effective for controlling seizures, though every patient is different.

Though experts don't know everything about why this diet is effective for seizure control, they do know that eating mostly fat causes the body to fuel on ketones rather than glucose, which ultimately lowers insulin levels. This can have an anti-inflammatory effect on the body and may prevent seizures by calming the brain, said Glick.

One study by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School found that a child's ability to stave off seizures is tied to a protein that affects metabolism in the brain. The protein, called BCL-2-associated Agonist of Cell Death, or BAD, also regulates metabolism of glucose. The researchers discovered that by modifying this, they switched metabolism in brain cells from glucose to ketone bodies, which are fat byproducts.

Glick said the diet plan didn't work for Jackson until he tried the most strict version, which was a 4 to 1 ratio of fat to protein and carbohydrates. Each day, he ate approximately 160 grams of fat, 8 to 10 grams of carbohydrates and 30 grams of protein, all of which amounted to about 1,700 calories a day.

Four months into the program, Jackson was seizure-free. He remained on the strict diet for two years with no return of seizures. His mother prepared foods from special recipes such as "keto" pizza made with a macadamia nut crust or chicken nuggets with coconut flour.

Over the summer -- after receiving a green light from his doctors -- Jackson, now 10 years old, began to wean himself off the diet, and his mother has slowly introduced foods such as breads and ice cream. He has maintained seizure-free and takes very little anti-seizure medication.

Research has found that for pediatric patients the anti-seizure effects of the diet often continue long after the child stops following the food plan, though the reason why remains unclear. This is typically not the case for adults, who may need to stay on the diet for life in order to control seizures.

"We've probably seen more kids go on the diets than adults, and adults are really set on their eating patterns," said Glick, adding that social obligations can make the diet difficult to fit into a grown person's lifestyle.

Jackson's mother said his doctors are hopeful that in the near future he may no longer need medication -- or a keto diet -- to stay seizure-free. "I think it's taught him a very important lesson about how food is as important as medicine, and how food affects the chemistry of your body," she said.

Source: www.cbsnews.com and http://www.dana-farber.org/

By JOSHUA NORMAN

With the Ebola outbreak dominating the national discourse, parents and caregivers are inevitably going to be confronted with the necessity of explaining the deadly and exotic disease to children.

One Connecticut company was already poised to help in that process, and it has seen a dramatic spike in sales as a result.

Giantmicrobes Inc. was founded about a decade ago with the intention of creating stuffed toys based on the actual microscopic images of various microbes as an educational tool for caregivers and young children, said Laura Sullivan, vice president of operations, in an interview with CBS News.

"It started with the common cold and similar things," Sullivan said. "It was marketed to pediatricians and parents initially. The idea is that kids respond favorably to stuffed animals."

The thinking is that children would be better able to understand what is happening in their body if they could see a softer, cuddlier version of it, Sullivan said.

Before long, the company's offerings expanded to a number of different of viruses and diseases, and the audience expanded with it.

About five years ago, the company began offering plush toys whose design was based on the microscopic image of the Ebola virus. Now, they are struggling to keep up with demand, Sullivan said.

While she declined to give specific sales figures for the Ebola plush toys, Sullivan said: "They're selling like hot cakes. We're out of stock again."

They have ramped up production with their Chinese manufacturers and are rushing to feed the demand, Sullivan said.

Their Ebola products - which include regular- and giant-sized plush recreations of the virus, as well a petri dish and something called "Primordial Putty" - are currently only available through the company's website, but much of the rest of their line can be found in everything from hospital gift shops to college bookstores to medical supply stores.

Sullivan said this isn't the first case of a headline-making disease affecting their sales. The swine flu outbreak a few years ago caused a similar spike in sales, but Sullivan added it was not quite at the level of Ebola.

"It's a neat little product," Sullivan said. "In the case of Ebola, it's been a helpful way for families talk about it and take some of the scariness away."

Source: www.cbsnews.com