Infants

This paper aims at providing a hypothesis for the treatment of Whooping cough in infants, caused by the pathogenic strain, Bordetella pertussis. The hypothesis is provided by using previously done works against the pathogen worldwide as a reference. Various bioinformatics tools, webservers and software were used in order to complete the task, which include, DrugBank Online | Database for Drug and Drug Target Info, BLAST (uniprot.org), Protein BLAST: search protein databases using a protein query (nih.gov), https://swissmodel.expasy.org/,https://phytochem.nal.usda.gov/phytochem/search, PubChem (nih.gov), RCSB PDB: Homepage, PyRx software and PyMOL. Two drug targets were selected namely, Pertactin and Adenylate cyclase exhibiting 91.96% and 93.88% of the Ramachandran favoured regions respectively. Highest binding affinity was observed to be-11 Kcal/mol, by 12-Ursene-3,6,21-Triol with Adenylate cyclase and-10.8 Kcal/mol by Rutin with Pertactin. According to the data documented and tabulated in the paper and the study conducted concludes that the plant Calendula officinalis and Nigella sativa can be preferred as a treatment option against the whooping cough caused by Bordetella pertussis in the infants and children.

Anthropologists have neglected a significant dimension to religion by ignoring the spiritual lives of a society's youngest members. In Côte d'lvoire, Beng infants are said to lead a profoundly spiritual existence. Indeed, until the age of five or so, Beng children are said to live at least part of the time in the spiritual other world (wrugbe) that they inhabited before being reincarnated. Exploring both ideology and praxis, the article probes the consequences for the daily experiences and care of Bang babies, including umbilical cord care, enemas, crying, adornment, naming, personality development, and infant disease and death. The article concludes by considering the implications of a full-blown treatment of infants for the practice of anthropology.

HIV infection and undernutrition remain significant public health concerns for infants and children. In infants and children under these conditions, undernutrition is one of the leading causes of death. Proper management of nutrition and related nutrition complications in these groups with increased nutrition needs are prominent challenges, particularly in HIV-prevalent poor-resource environments. Several studies support the complexity of the relation between HIV infection, nutrition, and the immune system. These elements interact and create a vicious circle of poor health outcomes. Recent studies on the use of probiotics as a novel approach to manage microbiome imbalance and gut-mucosal impairment in HIV infection are gaining attention. This new strategy could help to manage dysbiosis and gut-mucosal impairment by reducing immune activation, thereby potentially forestalling unwanted health outcomes in children with HIV. However, existing trials on HIV-infected children are still in...

BackgroundGrade II hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (GII-HIE) in newborns produces neurological sequelae in approximately 50% of patients. Neuro-rehabilitation offers rational therapeutic approaches in patients at risk of neurological damage; however, there is little information on comparison of different rehabilitation therapies.
Objective

Evaluate and compare results of Vojta therapy versus an early intervention program on the neurological and electrophysiological development of infants diagnosed with GII-HIE.

Methods

Controlled, randomized, simple blinded trial with term newborn patients diagnosed with GII-HIE, based on Sarnat-Sarnat criteria, aged 1-4 months. Thirty patients were recruited from the neonatology departments of two general hospitals in Mexico City. All patients underwent: Gesell Development Coefficient and evoked auditory, visual and somatosensorial potentials before therapy, and at 3 and 6 months of treatment. Therapy was applied by a therapist trained in the specific procedure for 30-40 minutes twice a week, for 6 months. The early intervention program includes proprioceptive and exteroceptive techniques that cover tactile stimulation (sucking, massage), vestibular stimulation, auditory stimulation (music, etc.), and visual stimulation (environment decoration, mobile elements).

Results

Twenty-seven patients finished the study, 13 girls and 14 boys, with an average age of 1.6 months; 12 had Vojta therapy and 15 early intervention. The Vojta therapy group had significantly higher scores in the Gesell test and its four neurological development areas (Mann-Whitney U, Gesell global, p=0.032; motor, p=0.04, language, p=0.01, adaptive, p= 0.01 and personal social, p= 0.02); in addition, there was also significant shortening (0.08 milliseconds) of the I-V interval in evoked auditory potential of the brain stem (p=0.05).Conclusions
Patients submitted to both therapies showed clinical and electrophysiological improvement, but the Vojta group had greater improvement in both the four areas of neurological development and in the I-V interval of evoked auditory potential.

In this paper I explore the multiple social ties that Beng infants forge with a large range of familiar and not-so-familiar Others.  In so doing, I highlight specific infant care practices that promote a large number of social relationships and meaningful “attachments” between a given infant and a wide variety of people, including both relatives and unrelated neighbors.  I then go on to investigate the striking case of "strangers," who also form part of the social universe of village-dwelling Beng babies.  I begin that section with a brief comparative discussion of the stranger in Beng and Western settings at large.  I then explore how the general image of the stranger shapes the ways in which Beng parents and other caretakers teach their babies to react to strangers, and how that experience contributes to the overall orientation of infants to sociabiity. 

Both these discussions form part of a broader argument: I aim to demonstrate that the Beng child-rearing agenda emphasizes as a major goal the imparting of the value of sociability.  Teaching infants to value social ties even to strangers is a dramatic version of this wider strategy.  In turn, the broad goal of socializing children to value high levels of sociability is motivated by a spiritual foundation: with an ideology of reincarnation combined with an extraordinarily high infant and child mortality rate, the major tenet of Beng infant care is to make the world appear as welcome a place as possible for babies.  Promoting a wide variety of social ties—whatever else its practical benefits for the labor supply of adults—is a meaningful component of this religious agenda.  I end the paper by looking at the implications that the Beng data hold for a general theory of childcare cross-culturally.

Oral  thrush  also  known  as  Oral  Moniliasis,  Oral  Candidiasis,  or
Oral Candida  albicans infection)  is a fungal  infection of the  oral
mucosa and tongue with Candida albicans. Causes a whitish lesion
that adheres to an underlying erythematous area. The lesion  may
slightly bleed and become painful when it is scraped.

Malnutrition is the largest risk factor caused by inadequate nutrition that leads to childhood morbidity and mortality, as well as inadequate growth and development. Infants are at increased risk of malnutrition by six months, when breast milk alone is no longer suffi cient to meet their nutritional requirements. However the factors associated with nutritional status of infants after 6 months of age have received little attention in pastoralist communities of Ethiopia. The aim of this study was to assess the complementary foods of infants and young children (6-23 months) in Gode town of Kebele 01. The prevalences of wasting, stunting and underweight among infants and young children were 6.1%, 56.1%, 10.0% reespectively. Undernutrition is a public health problem among infants and young children in Gode town of Kebele 01. Breastfeeding was slightly positive associated with lower chances of wasting at r=0.61, p= 0.01 and underweight at r=0.331, p=0.01. While diarrheal disease was associated with higher chances of wasting and underweight. Initiation of complementary food was slightly positive association with wasting at r=0.179, p=0.05.

This is a draft of a chapter that has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press in the forthcoming book The Oxford Handbook of Emotional Development edited by Dr. Daniel Dukes, Prof. Andrea C. Samson, and Prof. Eric A. Walle, and due for publication in 2021.

ABSTRACT
Within 6 weeks after birth, the endogenous smile comes under infants’ voluntary control,
serving as strong social currency between infants and others within their environment.
Shortly after, by just 4 months, infants laugh. But why? And what, if anything, does
laughter tell us about infants’ understanding of the world? For example, by 5 months,
infants appear to perceive the difference between absurd and ordinary events, and seemingly interpret absurd events as comical all by themselves without relying on cues from others. By six months, infants give the impression of employing fake laughter that can goad others into play, and by 8-months,  they appear capable of simple acts of deception that underlie teasing. This chapter investigates what early humor creation and perception reveal about infants’ knowledge of the social and physical world, and explores the social, emotional and cognitive power of humor in infancy.

Over the past three decades, our understanding of science learning in early childhood has improved exponentially and today we have a strong empirically based understanding of science experiences for children aged three to six years. However, our understanding of science learning as it occurs for children from birth to three years, is limited. We do not know enough about how scientific thinking develops across the first years of life. Identifying what we do know about science experiences for our youngest learners within the birth to three period specifically, is critical. This paper reviews the literature, and for the first time includes children in the birth to three period. The results are contextualised through a broader review of early childhood science education for children aged from birth to six years. Findings illustrated that the empirical research on science concept formation in the early years, has focused primarily, on children aged three to six years. The tendency of res...

Non-adult sex estimation is an active field of forensic inquiry as morphological variations between males and females are subtle,
but observable, even from intrauterine development. The objectives of this study are threefold: to test the validity of the auricular
surface method for sex estimation (Int J Osteoarchaeol 27:898–911, 2017) in fetuses and children under the age of 5 years old; to
evaluate if health conditions, reported as the cause of death, influence its accuracy; and to detect possible secular trends in sexual
dimorphism. One-hundred and ninety-seven skeletal individuals from the Lisbon and Granada Identified Collections were
studied. Individuals were divided according to the hormonal peaks (< 0, 0–2, < 2, and 2.1–5 years old), cause, and year of death
(before and after 1960). As in previous studies, two ratios (FI/CF and DE/AD) and two qualitative variables (OM and MRS)
showed the highest frequencies of correct estimation (0.81–0.86). The correct sex allocations increased when the discriminant
function (0.85) and logistic regression (0.86) were applied.Males of the age groups < 0 and 2.1–5 years were all correctly sexed
by both formulae, and the same was observed for the female probabilities of adequate allocation. The cause and year of death
were identified as variables without statistical significance. It is proposed that this method can be incorporated with confidence
into the multifactorial laboratory protocols for non-adult sex estimation from skeletal remains.

Background: Exclusive breastfeeding and timely complementary feeding are important for child health and growth, but their practices are low in many developing countries. This study aimed at determining the breastfeeding practices, complementary feeding practices and examining the sociodemographic characteristics that influences exclusive breastfeeding and complementary feeding practices among mothers attending child welfare clinic at Bingham University Teaching Hospital Jos.

It is well known that humans describe and think of numbers as being represented in a spatial configuration, known as the 'mental number line'. The orientation of this representation appears to depend on the direction of writing and reading habits present in a given culture (e.g., left-to-right oriented in Western cultures), which makes this factor an ideal candidate to account for the origins of the spatial representation of numbers. However, a growing number of studies have demonstrated that non-verbal subjects (preverbal infants and non-human animals) spontaneously associate numbers and space. In this review, we discuss evidence showing that pre-verbal infants and non-human animals associate small numerical magnitudes with short spatial extents and left-sided space, and large numerical magnitudes with long spatial extents and right-sided space. Together this evidence supports the idea that a more biologically oriented view can account for the origins of the 'mental number line'. In this paper, we discuss this alternative view and elaborate on how culture can shape a core, fundamental, number–space association.

If a disabled newborn infant dies, her parents may be able to conceive another child without impairment. This is sometimes referred to as ‘replacement’. Some philosophers have argued that replacement provides a strong reason for disabled newborns to be killed or allowed to die. In this paper I focus on the case for replacement as it relates to decisions about life support in newborn intensive care. I argue (following Jeff McMahan) that the impersonal reason to replace is weak and easily outweighed. I assess and reject several possible ways in which the impersonal reason to replace could be defended. I then address an alternative justification for replacement – as an individual-affecting benefit. The strongest justification for replacement may be the interests of parents. In the latter part of the paper I look at a related question. What role should replacement play in decisions about the funding of newborn intensive care?

Malnutrition during infancy has been linked to lack or low knowledge of appropriate feeding practices of the caregivers. This study determined
the effectiveness of nutrition education on Minimum Acceptable Diet (MAD) as an indicator of complementary feeding to achieve the nutrient
intake and nutrition status of infants (6-11months) in Ondo State, Nigeria. The study was a cluster randomized controlled trial design, whereby the
participants were assigned to two groups. One intervention and one control group in a ratio of 1:1. The sample size was 142 for intervention group
and 142 for the control group. Nutrition education on MAD was carried out among the caregivers in the intervention group and the control group
received no nutrition education. The nutrition education was based on dietary diversity and meal frequency putting into consideration the hygiene
practices

Intention reading and action understanding have been reported in ever-younger infants. However, the notions of intention attribution and action understanding, as well as their relation to each other, are surrounded by much confusion, making it difficult to assess the meaning and value of such findings. In this paper we set out to clarify the notions of ‘action understanding’ and ‘intention attribution’, and discuss their relation. We will show that what is commonly referred to as ‘action understanding’ in fact encompasses various heterogeneous association and prediction mechanisms. In general, these forms of action understanding do not result in the attribution of an intention to an observed actor. By disentangling intention attribution from action understanding, and by exposing the latter as an umbrella notion, we provide a framework that allows for better comparison of findings from different experimental paradigms, and a much more fruitful approach to comparative questions.

Belonging is emerging as an important concept in contemporary early childhood curricula, and calls have recently been made for belonging to be critically interrogated and further theorized. This article explores how belonging was operating for an infant in Australian family day care by looking at an episode that took place between the infant, a group of older children and the educator. The concepts of assemblage and desire from Deleuze and Guattari are used to problematize the episode and see something new. The complex and unresolved nature of belonging and infants’ roles and capacities within the politics of belonging are discussed. The paper attempts to stretch our thinking about how belonging operates for infants and the possibilities for theorizing belonging in early childhood education and care.

L’estudi “Les solidaritats amb ulls d’infant” analitza els valors
expressats pels nens i nenes al voltant de la solidaritat a través dels més de 1.000 contes rebuts en el marc del Premi Pilarín Bayés. Ofereix també reflexions i pistes educatives per educar millor els infants en la solidaritat.

Infants' ability to discriminate between auditory stimuli presented in rapid succession and differing in fundamental frequency (Rapid Auditory Processing [RAP] abilities) has been shown to be anomalous in infants at familial risk for Language Learning Impairment (LLI) and to predict later language outcomes. This study represents the first attempt to investigate RAP in Italian infants at risk for LLI (FH+), examining two critical acoustic features: frequency and duration, both embedded in a rapidly-presented acoustic environment. RAP skills of 24 FH+ and 32 control (FH−) Italian 6-month-old infants were characterized via EEG/ERP using a multi-feature oddball paradigm. Outcome measures of expressive vocabulary were collected at 20 months. Group differences favoring FH− infants were identified: in FH+ infants, the latency of the N2* peak was delayed and the mean amplitude of the positive mismatch response was reduced, primarily for frequency discrimination and within the right hemisphere. Moreover, both EEG measures were correlated with language scores at 20 months. Results indicate that RAP abilities are atypical in Italian infants with a first-degree relative affected by LLI and that this impacts later linguistic skills. These findings provide a compelling cross-linguistic comparison with previous research on American infants, supporting the biological unity hypothesis of LLI.

Exposure assessment of lead (Pb) and Arsenic (As) from food, water, and house dust intake were assessed among pregnant women, their children and fetuses in Pakistan and Japan, as well as their body burden of the metals in their blood.Fifty families which included a pregnant woman, a fetus and the 1–3-year-old siblings were recruited in Karachi and Khairpur in Pakistan, and Shimotsuke and Asahikawa in Japan, respectively. Their dietary exposure to Pb and As was measured in 3-day food duplicates and drinking water by ICP-MP. Pb in house dust and respirable dust was evaluated with an energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometry. Non-radioactive isotope Pb profiles of blood specimens will be compared with those of the exposure origins, such as food duplicates, respirable house dust, the soils nearby, and gasoline.Judging from the data collected and analyzed so far, contribution from dietary intake is highly correlated to higher body burden of Pb among Pakistani mothers. Additional ...

Background: Parents play a vital role in the assessment and management of pain. There is limited knowledge about parental viewpoint or their participation in the pain management of the neonates admitted to the intensive care units. The present study aimed to assess the viewpoints of mothers about the pain management of neonates/ infants admitted to Tabriz hospitals.

The study on beneficial effects of maternal vitamin A supplementation on some infants’ malaria-related morbidity in rural communities in Ebonyi State, Southeastern Nigeria was carried out between August 2010 and November, 2011. One hundred and fifty two (152) malaria parasitaemic pregnant women whose pregnancies had matured up to the 6th months were randomized into supplemented and placebo groups,
with each group consisting of 76 women. Ten thousand international units (iu) of vitamin A was administered to the supplemented group three times per week while the placebo group received the vitamin A soft gels drained off its active ingredients thrice weekly. The two groups
were followed up until they delivered their babies. On delivery of the babies, 200, 000 iu of vitamin A was administered within 8 weeks to the supplemented group. This regimen was cautiously repeated after every three month until the end of the study. The placebo group also
received placebo at equal frequencies until the study was over. The study lasted until the infants of the women of the two groups were 12 months old. Quarterly, from the third month postpartum, venous blood specimens were collected from the infants of both groups and used for
malaria parasite examinations, using standard parasitological techniques. Incidence of malaria-related morbidity among the infants was assessed with strict adherence to standard diagnostic methods and procedures. Data collected were analysed at p<0.05 level of significance, using analysis of variance ((ANOVA) and Fisher’s least significance difference (FLSD) for mean separation. T-test was used to compare the supplemented group with the placebo group and statistical significance was also determined at p<0.05. Maternal vitamin A supplementation was found to be beneficial in reducing the mean incidence of malaria-related morbidity among the infants irrespective of the fact that some
non-significant beneficial effects were observed in some cases. Its beneficial effect was most significantly recorded in the control of fever episodes. Pre-partum and post-partum vitamin A supplementation are therefore recommended for general infant health especially as it affects malaria morbidity.

This work gives growth reference values at birth to 24 months of age for Pakistan based on upper middle class infants. Growth rate reference values are also included and they are given for various interval lengths. The growth was differently affected in infants living in three poorer areas; the stunting incidence at 24 months of age was 63% in periurban slum, 54% in the village and 26% in the urban slum. Less differences could be seen between the areas in weight for length. There was an age dependency in the incidence of reduced growth; a normal length gain was seen at birth to about six months of age, but they were highly reduced at 6 to 18 months of age. The weight gain was to some degree reduced during the first 12 months of life, followed by a catch-up growth period. The seasonal influence was also age dependent; weight was highly affected during the summer at birth to 24 months of age, but not in the winter. The seasonal effect in length was marginal at birth to 6 months, little at 6 to 12 months (although, constant below the normal) and large at 12 to 24 months of age. We did not see any seasonality of growth in the reference group. The incidence of reduced growth reflects the socio-economic differences in one restricted geographic area, i.e., in the city of Lahore, Pakistan.

When does a human being acquire legal personality? I would like to stand on the shoulders of giants in order to address the rights of the tiniest human beings, for what is at issue is nothing less than the very notion of human rights. Human embryos and fetuses, however small and vulnerable, are unquestionably living human beings of the species Homo sapiens. If we possess any human rights, it is purely and simply because we are human. I was once a living human embryo and am still a living human being, last I checked. If I have human rights, I had them when I began to be a living human being. Perhaps Dr. Seuss’s Horton the Elephant, throwing his massive weight around, said it most succinctly, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.” But in a law school setting, I do not suppose that qualifies as legal authority. Too bad. How about William Blackstone, then? And for this, I must acknowledge the magisterial work of a University of St. Thomas School of Law professor, Michael Stokes Pau...