Posted on: September 22, 2006
Oh, Baby!
How vaccinations lost their sting; plus the latest on designer babies.
Babies left unprotected by lagging vaccinations
A third of American children were not fully vaccinated for more than six months, putting them at risk of disease, says the U.S. Centers of Disease Control. Another fourth had delays in getting their shots in the first two years of life.
In determining the number of days kids were under-vaccinated for such diseases as diphtheria and tetanus, pertussis, polio, measles, mumps, rubella hepatitis, researchers found children were unprotected for an average of 172 days, according to their results, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Moms who were unmarried, non-college educated, living with two or more kids or black were more likely to under-vaccinate their babies. However, researchers suggested that those moms could use more help from extended doctor’s office hours to alleviate difficulty getting off from work and providing baby-sitters at work, among other ideas for increasing their access to health-care.
“Minimizing the time spent incompletely protected from vaccine-preventable diseases is important to the health of individuals,” CDC researchers said, “and to the public health and should be given greater emphasis by public health programs and vaccination providers.”
Wannabe parents want a choice
Women being treated for infertility would rather choose the sex of their child, which poses a dilemma for the ethics of sex selection, according to the journal Fertility and Sterility.
But don't worry, says Dr. Tarun Jain, a University of Illinois reproductive and endocrinology professor, 41 percent of childless women surveyed would choose baby girls and boys and equal numbers.
Currently, sex selection is reserved for preventing genetic disorders, not for nonmedical reasons. However, previous studies haven't considered how popular sex selection would be if it were accessible, Jain says.
“Sex selection is a topic that's almost taboo for physicians to talk about,” Jain says. “Yet it's important to understand patient interest ... and adequately address the ethical and social implications before the cat is out of the bag.”
What implications? There's the belief that society would prefer boys over girls and a population imbalance replete with gender stereotyping and discrimination would result.
In fact, women with only girls wanted a boy; women with only boys wanted a girl. Women who were older, not religious, willing to pay for sex selection, had more living kids, had only sons or a diagnosis of male infertility wanted a daughter. Moreover, nonwhites had the strongest desires to choose the sex of their baby.
© Content That Works