Babble

Given that pregnant women are among those considered at high risk for severe cases of swine flu, and there has been at least one death, concerned doctors have experimented with giving them antiviral medications early, to apparently good results. The numbers are small (20 women tracked by the CDC so far), and drugs like Tamiflu are usually not ...

The public health blog Effect Measure has gotten their hands on a set of leaked minutes from a meeting of representatives of industries that use the toxic endocrine-mimicker bisphenol-A (BPA) on how to counter the negative media about it. It's rich: They figure getting a scientific spokesperson won't be possible (gee, why?), but are ...

The New York Times (h/t Creative Class blog) has an interesting report on the financial penalties sustained in different fields by people who take some time out of the workforce. Apparently, although medicine has the most grueling training, once you get there, it's a lot easier on work/life balance than, say, finance, business consulting, or ...

Don't mess with the soccer moms. It might be a bit of a hackneyed sentiment in this post-Palin era, but as Sarah Rain from Delmar, NY, found out when she wrote a post titled "At Least It's Only 8 Weeks Long" on the local paper's blog for her town discussing her dislike of soccer season, the vicious soccer mom isn't ...

Hurricanes, of course, do plenty damage. And then there are the many dangers that follow that them, including carbon monoxide poisoning from poorly functioning/ventilated generators. A creepy little report in the June issue of Pediatrics gives a new spin on this problem: Texas researchers note that in 75 percent of the cases of kids who were ...

It was originally an antiwar holiday, but was defanged and corrupted to be about cards and flowers and brunch.It was originally an antiwar holiday, meaning you should be vigiling or writing letters to Congress when all you want is to sleep in and have brunch. The hoopla over it as compared to Father's Day just proves how society still expects ...

A few weeks ago I was at Music Together with my daughter. We were singing a song where a typical verse went like this:"Who's that tapping at the window? /Who's that knocking at the door? Mommy's tapping at the window?/Daddy's knocking at the door."(Makes you think of the toddlers who lock their parents out, doesn't ...

If you thought I was a nitpicker when I went after science errors in children's books that were trying to be realistic, you'll have a conniption about this: some of bloggers over at scienceblogs.com have started taking on fairy tales: the thermodynamics of cooling porridge in Goldliocks and the physics of hair rope-ladders in Rapunzel. ...

This will not come as a surprise to anyone who knows anything about me, but let me clarify that I describe Robie Harris's It's Perfectly Normal as "controversial" because, technically, it is true: It has caused a lot of controversy, frequently hitting the top ten list of most-challenged books, inspiring hysterical accusations of ...

If you were a lesbian couple, where would you think to go to learn about "navigating the medical world as a lesbian couple, communication between the birth and non-birth mother, changing desires, and 'donor dads.'"? Perhaps your local sex toy store? No, not the one under the overpass with the blocked up windows and purple neon ...