International Playthings Inc., of Parsippany, N.J. has voluntarily recalled approximately 10,000 units of Taggies™ Strollin’ Along Stroller Activity Bars. The shiny material on the elephant’s ear on the activity bar can detach, posing a choking hazard to young children. International Playthings has received three reports of the shiny material detaching and children putting it in his/her mouth. No injuries have been reported.


Click here to find out more about this recall.

Kaiser Permanente is telling 960 mothers that they and their babies may have been exposed to a San Francisco maternity ward worker diagnosed with active tuberculosis.


Kaiser announced it had started notifying patients Tuesday about the worker formerly employed in the postpartum unit of its San Francisco Medical Center.


The part-time employee worked at Kaiser from March 10 to August 10 and no longer works for the organization.


Kaiser learned of the employee's diagnosis last week and said the medical center followed all appropriate screening procedures when hiring the employee.


Kaiser's infectious disease chief in Northern California said the infection risk for patients was low and that the worker had a common strain of TB that responds well to antibiotics.

Infections may play a bigger role in premature birth than doctors have thought, says a new study that found almost one in seven women in preterm labor harbored bacteria or fungi in their amniotic fluid.


It's a small study, and it doesn't prove that the germs triggered the early labor.


But Monday's research used specialized molecular testing to uncover microbes that ordinary methods miss, and thus uncovered more women with simmering infections than previously estimated.


The more heavily infected the amniotic fluid, the more likely the woman was to deliver a younger, sicker baby, researchers reported in PLoS One, the online journal of the Public Library of Science.


"We don't think any organisms belong in the amniotic sac," said Stanford University microbiologist Dr. David Relman, the study's senior author. "You'd have to presume there's something wrong."

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A month-old law in the US state of Nebraska which allows babies and children up to the age of 19 to be abandoned without their parents' knowledge was slammed Monday by a lawmaker and children's rights group.


The law "creates far more problems than it will ever solve, and it leaves the underlying problem untouched," said Ernie Chambers, the only lawmaker in the Nebraska state legislature to vote against the bill.

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Until she was 11 months old, Aleanie Remy-Marquez could have starred in an advertisement for breast milk. She took to nursing easily, was breast-fed exclusively for six or seven months, and ate little else even after that. She was alert and precocious and developed at astonishing speed, her mother said, sitting at four months and walking by eight months.


But once Aleanie started putting weight on her feet, her mother noticed that her legs were curving in a bow shape below the knees. Doctors diagnosed vitamin D-deficiency rickets, a softening of the bones that develops when children do not get enough vitamin D — a crucial ingredient for absorbing calcium and building bone, and the one critical hormone that breast milk often cannot provide enough of.


“I thought I was doing the best thing for her,” said Stephanie Remy-Marquez, of Hyde Park, Mass., after blood tests showed her daughter had no detectable vitamin D. X-ray images of the baby’s wrists and knees showed the edges of the bones and growth plates as blurry and fraying instead of crisp and sharp.

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