I discovered Abercrombie & Fitch when my daughter, now nearly 13, was an infant. What grabbed my attention was a wall-sized poster of a young man who, as best I could tell from the photograph, was completely nude. I rushed inside to see if I could buy that kind of nakedness and, if so, how much it would cost, because he had exactly the killer abs I wanted! Sadly, they only sold flannel shirts which, for $75, could cover my post-residency paunch so that people might assume I had also bought the abs but was just too humble to flaunt them. I passed on the shirt, and then I uttered a little prayer: “Please, Lord, let consumers lose interest in this retailer before my little girl grows old enough to want to shop there, or at their down-market affiliate, Hollister.” Amen.
Smoking Gun
There’s no way, in a million years, you’d ever guess the latest scientific finding on why children exposed to cigarette smoke in the home tend to get more asthma, bronchitis, and pneumonia. You’re more likely to guess why people remain fascinated with Snooki, or how the Oogieloves movie got green-lighted. Okay, I’ll just tell you: they don’t cough enough. That’s right, according to a new study out of Philadelphia, children exposed to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) cough too little, not too much, at least when they’re not sick, which they are, often.
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Take that, capsaicin: High tolerance to habanero pepper fumes is perhaps the one and only benefit from exposure to environmental tobacco smoke.
“How,” I hear you asking, “do you know if someone coughs enough?” I wondered the same thing, but fortunately the Methods section is clear: you make them inhale purified habanero peppers (capsaicin). Apparently pepper gas is irritating to the lungs, but if you breathe secondhand smoke day and night, you become less sensitive to this and other irritants, an adaptation that proves quite useful for those who live in regions with frequent jalapeño wildfires, but is not so good if you’re trying to fight off viruses, bacteria, or environmental pollutants. The researchers felt their findings might also explain why children of smokers are more likely to take up smoking themselves, being less sensitive to the lungs’ way of telling the brain, “Either you’re trying to kill us, or someone has torched the Taqueria!”
A Perfect Fit
How many times as a parent have you wondered, “Is this behavior normal?” Wouldn’t you feel relieved if only someone could just tell you, “No, it’s not. It may be an early sign of a psychiatric or developmental disorder.” Now, thanks to an article in this month’s Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, we have a better idea of what’s normal for childhood tantrums and when it’s a whole other candy aisle. After surveying parents of 1,500 preschoolers, researchers determined that while nearly 84% of children aged 3 to 5 years have periodic tantrums, only 8.6% had an outburst every day.
Most tantrums resulted from the routine challenges and disappointments of daily life, like having to take a nap, losing a toy to a playmate, or contemplating that we’re unlikely to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East. Researchers point out that inexplicable, violent, or unusually frequent tantrums are more likely to signal the presence of underlying psychopathology and, if unchecked, may lead to a career in Congress.
Good Shot
With all the bad news about Bisphenol A, aging male gametes, and pesticides, you’ve got to wonder if there’s anything out there any more that doesn’t cause birth defects! As it turns out, there is: flu vaccine. The largest-ever study of women receiving influenza vaccine during pregnancy found that not only did the vaccine not increase rates of congenital malformations, women who received the vaccine had lower rates of preterm birth, stillbirth, and neonatal death. To me these data make vaccinating pregnant women against the flu a complete no-brainer, a high-stakes win-win for mom and baby, but I have no doubt that somewhere on the Internet at this very moment someone is posting scare stories about the flu vaccine that will lead a certain number of mothers to choose preterm delivery, stillbirth, and neonatal death over a quick shot in the arm. To make myself feel better, I’m going to take my daughter shopping at one of those popular stores where the models all wear clothes, lots of them.
David L. Hill, M.D, FAAP, is vice president of Cape Fear Pediatrics in Wilmington, NC and is an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Program Director for the AAP Council on Communications and Media and 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. Dr. Hill is the author of Dad to Dad: Parenting Like A Pro (AAP Publishing 2012).