Quick, finish the following sentence: “What the world needs now is...” If you said “love, sweet love” you are either an idealist or a Burt Bacharach fan. If you said, “peace, love, and understanding,” you, like I, often confuse Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello. And if you said The Smurfs 2, you are an executive at Columbia Pictures. Absolutely no one else would give that answer.
iStockphoto iStockphoto iStockphoto iStockphoto
iStockphotoWhat the world really needs now is lots more happy pink flying unicorns!
Meh
You notice how sometimes, when people finally get something they really, really wanted, they don’t seem all that excited? If anticipation were worth anything, my 13-year-old daughter would still run to me every morning, give me a crushing hug, and thank me for that My Little Pony. But no, Rainbow is pastured, along with Pasture, in a box in the attic, and now my daughter is begging me to fix the cracked screen on her iPhone, which she’ll probably barely appreciate when she’s 30.
But say you had something really big, like a way to prevent a common cancer. Don’t you think people would remain excited about it? Apparently not, if the cancer is cervical and the way is a vaccine as opposed to what people were expecting, a flying unicorn. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just published a report stating that, after years of growth, use of vaccines against human papillomavirus has stalled out at around 53%-54%, dooming thousands to avoidable deaths in coming years from cervical and oropharyngeal malignancies.
Parents who declined the vaccine for their daughters gave five main reasons when surveyed: vaccine not needed (19.1%), vaccine not recommended (14.2%), vaccine safety concerns (13.1%), lack of knowledge about the vaccine or the disease (12.6%), and daughter is not sexually active (10.1%). Researchers conducting the study suffered an increased rate of concussions from repeatedly smacking their heads against the cinder-block walls of the CDC. Upon recovery, they issued a recommendation that physicians redouble their efforts at educating parents about HPV vaccine and that the CDC administration consider using softer materials in future wall construction.
Brain food
Rarely in life do we get the satisfaction of having something we hoped would be true turn out to actually be true. I get a little smug remembering how, when other kids would taunt me in third grade, I’d shout through my tears, “One day, many years from now, I’ll have a lovely wife, talented children, and high job satisfaction, so there!” Come to think of it, there may have been a reason I was picked on...
Now breastfeeding advocates can point to actual evidence that prolonged nursing increases kids’ IQs, a claim that’s been floated before but backed by the sort of highly questionable data usually reserved for political pundits. The new study out of Boston correlated duration of breastfeeding with measures of intelligence in 1,312 infants, finding that continued nursing for the first 12 months of life accounted for a 4-point bump in IQ at age 7 years.
Researchers were quick to point out that no single study is definitive, and they added that 4 IQ points are not so many that most people would notice. One anonymous academic explained, “It’s not so much the difference between inventing Apple and working at GameStop. It’s more like the difference between Despicable Me 2 and The Smurfs 2.”
Falling behind
As wealth disparities continue to worsen in the U.S., pediatric researchers are thinking, “You know what we’re gonna need more of? Measures of childhood poverty.” So much attention has been paid to the 17 million American children living with food insecurity, that we’ve totally ignored the other side of the equation, but not anymore. Now researchers publishing in Pediatrics have validated a new measure of early childhood economic stress: diaper need.
It turns out that around 30% of mothers cannot afford adequate diapers for their children and that, as you might imagine, this situation contributes to family stress. It also turns out that some communities offer resources to help these mothers, which, like, who knew? I’ll be looking for these resources for patients in my own city, since, according to the tagline of this week’s major animated release, “Smurf happens.”
David L. Hill, M.D., FAAP is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like a Pro (AAP Publishing, 2012). He is also vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, N.C., and adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves as Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and as an executive committee member of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. He has recorded commentaries for NPR's All Things Considered and provided content for various print, television and Internet outlets.