(HealthDay News) — Potty training accidents can be frustrating
for parents and kids, but they’re usually a part of the learning
process.

The American Academy of Pediatrics offers this list of common reasons
for potty training missteps:

• Toddlers and preschool-age children can be overwhelmed by their
  surroundings.
• Children may have difficulty prioritizing their concerns, such as the
  need to use the potty.
• Children may be intensely focused on what they’re doing — at the
  expense of stopping to go to the bathroom — whether it’s playing outside
  or working on a new skill.
• Children may be unable to express that something is wrong, such as
  painful urination or constipation.

Copyright © 2012HealthDay. All rights reserved.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – A new government study reports that while fewer kids and teens are getting exposed to secondhand smoke while riding in the car, rates of exposure are still high enough to warrant concern.

The authors recommend that more parts of the country ban smoking in cars carrying kids — laws that are on the books in four states.

In a survey of middle and high school students, close to one-third said they’d driven in a car with someone who was smoking in the past week.

Researchers said parents and other drivers may not realize that even when the windows are down, smoking in a vehicle can create toxic levels of circulating smoke.

“The concentrations just get very high — they get as high as in a very, very smoky bar,” said Dr. Ana Navas-Acien, who has studied secondhand smoke in cars at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

“It’s important for children, definitely, but it’s a problem for everybody,” Navas-Acien, who wasn’t involved in the new study, told Reuters Health.

Even for smokers’ own health, she added, “It’s really important for them to realize that they should not smoke in such a small, confined space.”

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that four states — Arkansas, California, Louisiana and Maine — have bans on smoking in cars carrying kids younger than 13 to 18, depending on the law. Puerto Rico also bars the practice.

Navas-Acien agreed with the authors that extending those laws to more of the country is necessary to protect kids from health problems linked to secondhand smoke, such as asthma and respiratory and ear infections.

For the new study, Brian King of the CDC and his colleagues analyzed data from the National Youth Tobacco Survey, conducted nationwide in more than 20,000 kids in grades six through 12 every couple of years between 2000 and 2009.

Students were asked if they smoked themselves, as well as if they’d been in the car with someone who was smoking in the past week.

By 2009, almost nine in every ten youth said they didn’t smoke.

During the study period, the number of participants who reported recently being exposed to secondhand smoke in the car dropped from 48 percent to 30 percent overall.

Among smokers, that rate fell from 82 percent to 76 percent, and in non-smokers, from 39 percent to 23 percent.

King’s team speculated in its study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, that those declines may be due to more smoke-free laws and fewer people smoking in the United States in general, as well as a changing public attitude about the appropriateness of smoking near kids.

But more needs to be done, researchers agreed.

“The alarming fact of it is, there’s about one in five (non-smoking kids) that are still exposed in this environment,” King told Reuters Health.

“We have evidence that there’s no safe level for exposure” to secondhand smoke, he added.

“People are recognizing the importance of protecting children in cars, and that the amount of tobacco smoke in cars reaches levels that are quite high,” said Geoffrey Fong, a tobacco researcher from the University of Waterloo in Canada who didn’t participate in the new research.

He said that most provinces in Canada have also passed laws prohibiting smoking while youth are in the car.

“I envision that we are going to be seeing these kinds of laws passed throughout North America… and throughout the world. It makes sense,” he told Reuters Health.

“Smoking in cars constitutes a significant public health hazard — that’s quite intuitive.”

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/cxXOG Pediatrics, online February 6, 2012.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Nearly 4,600 U.S. children were hospitalized with broken bones, traumatic brain injury and other serious damage caused by physical abuse in 2006, according to a new report.

Babies younger than one were the most common victims, with 58 cases per 100,000 infants. That makes serious abuse a bigger threat to infant safety than SIDS, or sudden infant death syndrome, researchers say in the report.

“There is a national campaign to prevent SIDS,” said Dr. John Leventhal of Yale University, who led the new study. “We need a national campaign related to child abuse where every parent is reminded that kids can get injured.”

The new study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, is the first broad U.S. estimate of serious injuries due to child abuse.

Based on data from the 2006 Kids’ Inpatient Database, the last such numbers available, Leventhal’s team found that six out of every 100,000 children under 18 were hospitalized with injuries ranging from burns to wounds to brain injuries and bone fractures.

The children spent an average of one week in the hospital; 300 of them died.

The rate of abuse was highest among children under one, particularly if they were covered by Medicaid, the government’s health insurance for the poor. One out of every 752 of those infants landed in the hospital due to maltreatment.

“Medicaid is just a marker of poverty, and poverty leads to stress,” said Leventhal, who is the medical director of the Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital Child Abuse Program.

Last year, a study from four U.S. states showed a clear spike in abusive brain injuries following the financial crash in late 2007, a finding researchers chalked up to the added pressure on parents.

In that study, too, toddlers appeared to be at higher risk. That led researchers to suggest the maltreatment might have been triggered by crying.

If a caretaker shakes a baby violently to make him or her stop crying, they can cause “shaken baby syndrome,” in which the brain bumps up against the skull and starts bleeding.

Leventhal said babies may also be more vulnerable that older kids.

“The most serious injuries tend to be in the younger kids,” he told Reuters Health.

The researchers estimate that the hospitalizations cost about $73.8 million in 2006, although that’s only a fraction of the overall cost of abuse to society.

“This is a serious problem that affects young children,” said Leventhal, whose team is now examining more recent data to refine the findings. “We need to figure out a way to help parents do better.”

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/cxXOG Pediatrics, online February 6, 2012.

(Reuters) – More than 100 people on board a cruise ship operated by a unit of Carnival Corp have fallen ill with a stomach virus, the latest setback facing the world’s biggest cruise company, which came under scrutiny last month for the Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster in Italy.

Ninety passengers and 13 crew members on the Ruby Princess cruise ship contracted the Norovirus, a contagious gastrointestinal illness that causes vomiting and diarrhea for one to three days, Julie Benson, a spokeswoman for Princess Cruises, a unit of Carnival, said in a statement.

The Ruby Princess set sail from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on January 29 to the Caribbean and returned to Florida on Sunday, as scheduled. Another Carnival ship, the Crown Princess, was affected by the same virus last week, but it has been sanitized and has already embarked on its next cruise, Benson said.

Carnival is dealing with the financial impact of the Costa Concordia shipwreck, which tarnished its image and raised questions about the safety of the entire luxury cruise ship industry. The Costa Concordia capsized off the coast of Italy, killing 17 people. Fifteen people are still missing.

Carnival said on January 30 it would take a profit hit ranging from $155 million to $175 million this year because of costs related to the wreck. The company has said it will release a revised full-year earnings forecast in March.

Royal Caribbean Cruise Ltd, the second-largest cruise operator and one of Carnival’s rivals, warned on February 2 that it would face a sharp drop-off in new cruise bookings because of the wreck, which could cut its earnings in half during the current quarter.

Shares of Carnival closed at $32.00 per share on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday while shares of Royal Caribbean closed at $30.59.

(Reporting By Liana B. Baker; Editing by Leslie Adler)

(Reuters) – Elderly adults who regularly drink green tea may stay more agile and independent than their peers over time, according to a Japanese study that covered thousands of people.

Green tea contains antioxidant chemicals that may help ward off the cell damage that can lead to disease. Researchers have been studying green tea’s effect on everything from cholesterol to the risk of certain cancers, with mixed results so far.

For the new study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers decided to examine the question of whether green tea drinkers have a lower risk of frailty and disability as they grow older.

Yasutake Tomata of the Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine and his colleagues followed nearly 14,000 adults aged 65 or older for three years.

They found those who drank the most green tea were the least likely to develop “functional disability,” or problems with daily activities or basic needs, such as dressing or bathing.

Specifically, almost 13 percent of adults who drank less than a cup of green tea per day became functionally disabled, compared with just over 7 percent of people who drank at least five cups a day.

“Green tea consumption is significantly associated with a lower risk of incident functional disability, even after adjustment for possible confounding factors,” Tomata and his colleagues wrote.

The study did not prove that green tea alone kept people spry as they grew older.

Green-tea lovers generally had healthier diets, including more fish, vegetables and fruit, as well as more education, lower smoking rates, fewer heart attacks and strokes, and greater mental sharpness.

They also tended to be more socially active and have more friends and family to rely on.

But even with those factors accounted for, green tea itself was tied to a lower disability risk, the researchers said.

People who drank at least five cups a day were one-third less likely to develop disabilities than those who had less than a cup per day. Those people who averaged three or four cups a day had a 25 percent lower risk.

Although it’s not clear how green tea might offer a buffer against disability, Tomata’s team did note that one recent study found green tea extracts seem to boost leg muscle strength in older women.

While green tea and its extracts are considered safe in small amounts, they do contain caffeine and small amounts of vitamin K, which means it could interfere with drugs that prevent blood clotting. SOURCE: http://bit.ly/wXuZbl

(Reporting from New York by Reuters Health; Editing by Elaine Lies and Paul Tait)