Consumer Reports: The new Motrin?

Wonderingwilla emailed me a couple of days back with this link to a recent Consumer Reports article titled “Five products not to buy for your baby”. The mention of two AP-related paraphernalia – cosleepers and slings – has, like the babywearing Motrin ad last November, raised the ire of the AP/NP crowd. It hasn’t quite yet reached the proportions of that particular storm yet (see Twitter activity), but it may still.

Prepare some tissues and some rotten tomatoes…

And then go watch this Australian TV feature:

New to the science-based blogosphere

I’ve been updating my blogroll today, and I’m happy to say that compared to…well, not too long ago, there are plenty of link-worthy new blogs out there.

Most of you probably already know Dr. Amy Tuteur from Homebirth Debate (which is staying in my blogroll even though it’s no longer active, because it’s a great resource). Building upon the success of her newer blog at Salon, she has now launched The Skeptical OB. Some of the subjects might seem familiar to you from her previous blogs, but there is a lot of new material as well, and knowing Amy, the discussions in the comments are sure to be interesting.

Squillo, a commenter here who I first met in the comments of Dr. Amy’s blog, has decided to try her hand at blogging as well. She does so (and very well, I might add) at Confutata. Don’t miss her recent takedown of Jim Carrey’s HuffPo screed. (Yes, I know I should have tackled that one, but so many have already, and did it so much better).

Lastly, I recently found a new blog (up since January) written by a Canadian pharmacist, Scott Gavura, called Science-Based Pharmacy – not to be confused with the other two blogs in my blogroll with similar names (which are also always worth a look). Scott’s post on bioidentical hormones is a favorite of mine – a fellow family physician with an ‘alternative’ bent living in my city has made millions by prescribing these to all the posh Tel Aviv ladies with hypochondria and money to burn *sigh*. Similarly, his most recent post on the efficacy of other ‘natural’ treatments for menopausal symptoms is a great read.

Have fun reading!

Hope for a CMV vaccine

Cytomegalovirus, or CMV for short, belongs to the herpesvirus family, along with the herpes simplex, Epstein-Barr, and chickenpox virus. It causes a mononucleosis-like disease similar to EBV, mainly in teens and young adults (they don’t call it ‘the kissing disease’ for nothing!), and in children the primary infection may have no symptoms at all or mimic another viral infection. Like all herpesviruses, it stays in the body indefinitely, occasionally and asymptomatically entering the bloodstream and other bodily fluids. Transmission to another person is usually accomplished by sharing utensils, kissing, and rarely via blood products. In immunosuppressed people, CMV (either primary infection or reactivation) can cause very severe and life-threatening infections.

Skeptical Parent Crossing #7 is up!

Over at Clashing Culture.

Have a blast!

Now you can not only feed the world…

Through websites such as Free Rice. Now you can vaccinate the world, too!

At givevaccines.org, you play a word game while donating milliliters of life-saving vaccines via the GAVI Alliance (Go visit their website if you’ve never heard of them, they do holy work).

I might put my meager Photoshop skills to work making a button to link to these folks on this blog’s sidebar.

Pacifiers: they don’t suck as much as you thought

It’s no secret that APers don’t like pacifiers. Besides the fact that they’re made out of ‘unnatural’ materials such as plastic or latex, pacifiers serve as ‘mommy substitutes’ for the purpose of non-nutritive sucking, and we know that anything which fills in for Mommy is a bad, bad thing. When the AAP released its 2005 policy statement regarding measures to prevent SIDS, Attachment Parenting International took issue not only with the recommendation against bedsharing, but also because they recommended pacifier use, even though there is quite a bit of evidence to recommend the practice as a SIDS prevention measure ,though the exact mechanism by which this occurs is not known:

The (not quite) anti-CIO poster child: Macall Gordon, Part II

This is a continuation of my previous post, which analyzes the claims brought up in this poster by Macall Gordon, a psychology graduate student who maintains there is no proof CIO techniques are safe before a baby is a year old.

The (not quite) anti-CIO poster child: Macall Gordon, Part I

I’ve been aware of this poster for a while now. Macall Gordon, an ‘academic’ (at the time of the poster’s making she was studying for her Master’s degree in Antioch University, Seattle) presented it at the 2007 Biennial Meeting of the Society for research in Child Development, and chaired a roundtable discussion symposium on the subject of “Crying Before Sleep: What Do We Know About Behavioral Sleep Training in Infancy?” there.

The poster’s claims, supposedly, lay a foundation for claiming there is no evidence in the research for using CIO methods in children under 12 months of age, because we don’t know what the psychological effects will be.

A brief distraction from Passover cleaning

to bring you some more really good, must-read articles about the vaccine/autism non-hypothesis. For some of you, these will be nothing new, but they are really great, up-to-date and accessible resources to ‘educamate’ the masses, if you know what I mean.

Anatomy of a Scare – Newsweek

Treating Autism as if Vaccines Caused It, by Arthur Allen, Slate

Also in Slate – The Hawthorne Effect:Why parents swear by ineffective treatments for autism.

Enjoy!