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Seems like kids are always getting into something, so products marketed toward them often claim to repel liquids. Some items contain potentially harmful per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to accomplish this feat, but companies aren’t required to disclose these “forever chemicals” on labels. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology show that some children’s products advertised as water- or stain-resistant contain PFAS, even items labeled “green” or “nontoxic.”
Exposure to PFAS through inhalation and ingestion has been linked to a number of health concerns, including decreased effectiveness of vaccines in children, cancers and high cholesterol, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But few studies have looked at potential PFAS exposures among kids and teens from the products they interact with. So, Laurel Schaider and colleagues wanted to see whether these compounds were present in apparel, bedding and furnishings that are marketed to children or expected to be used by them.
The team’s data revealed that 54 of the 93 items surveyed contained fluorine, an indicator of PFAS. Of the fluorine-containing products, 18 had measurable levels of at least one PFAS. A total of 19 had precursor compounds that can be transformed into highly stable perfluoroalkyl acids when oxidized in the environment or the human body. PFAS and their precursors were only found in items specifically labeled with trademarks for water- or stain-resistance, or that used similar wording, such as “waterproof,” “stainproof” or “leak-proof.” Some of these products also had green certifications or claimed to be nontoxic. The team explains that these results were not surprising because many certification processes don’t include a check for PFAS, or they have higher acceptable limits than the levels found in this study. Overall, products marketed toward young consumers as water- or stain-resistant could contain PFAS, which the researchers say represents a nonessential use of these substances. They suggest that these substances be removed to protect children’s health.
The authors acknowledge funding from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health and Silent Spring Institute.
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Materials provided by American Chemical Society. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesNearly 300 probable cases of children with severe hepatitis have been detected in 20 countries worldwide, with some in South East Asia, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said.Health officials around the world are investigating a mysterious increase in cases of the liver condition which was first spotted in the UK.A common virus called adenovirus, which has rebounded after the pandemic, could be causing the surge.One death has been reported by the WHO.As of 1 May, it said most cases of young children with hepatitis had been detected in Europe with small numbers also reported in the Americas, western Pacific and South East Asia.The first cases of this unusual hepatitis were spotted in Scotland in children under the age of 10. More than 140 cases are now being investigated in the UK.Hepatitis in children: What is causing it?Virus probable cause of mysterious child hepatitisChild hepatitis cases falsely linked to Covid jabMost UK children had a mild form of liver inflammation, although 10 children have needed a liver transplant.They had initial symptoms of vomiting and diarrhoea followed by yellowing of the skin or whites of the eyes, called jaundice.The hepatitis viruses that normally cause the condition (viruses A, B, C, D and E) were not detected in any of the children. Countries worldwide started looking for the unexplained liver condition ‘of unknown origin’ in children after it was highlighted by UK health officials.There is no reason to believe the rare condition itself is spreading around the world.Higher levels than normalThe WHO says it’s not yet clear if there has been an increase in hepatitis cases, or an increase in awareness of the condition which would normally go undetected.Scientists believe that a common virus which has rebounded since the pandemic could be playing a role. It has been circulating at much higher levels than normal recently.Adenovirus was the most common pathogen detected in about three-quarters of the UK children with confirmed hepatitis who were tested.And a particular type of adenovirus, called F41, was found in a quarter of those children’s blood. The same adenovirus is also reported to have been found in nine children with hepatitis in the United States.UK health officials believe young children, who were not exposed to common viruses during the Covid pandemic because of reduced social mixing, are now being infected when they have no previous protection.There are 50 different types of adenovirus and they generally cause colds, and sometimes sickness and diarrhoea. They rarely cause hepatitis in healthy children.Health experts are also investigating other causes, such as the emergence of a new strain of adenovirus, a previous Covid infection or both occurring at the same time.”While adenovirus is a possible hypothesis, investigations are ongoing for the causative agent,” the WHO said.More on this storyHepatitis in children: How many cases are there?Virus probable cause of mysterious child hepatitisRelated Internet LinksHepatitis – UKHSAThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

In early 2021, scientists in Colombia discovered a worrisome new coronavirus variant. This variant, eventually known as Mu, had several troubling mutations that experts believed could help it evade the immune system’s defenses.Over the following months, Mu spread swiftly in Colombia, fueling a new surge of Covid-19 cases. By the end of August, it had been detected in dozens of countries, and the World Health Organization had designated it a “variant of interest.”“Mu was starting to make some noise globally,” said Joseph Fauver, a genomic epidemiologist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and an author of a recent study on the variant.And then it fizzled. Today, the variant has all but vanished.For every Delta or Omicron there is a Gamma, Iota or Mu, variants that drove local surges but never swept to global dominance. And while understanding Omicron remains a critical public health priority, there are lessons to be learned from these lesser lineages, experts say.“This virus has no incentive to stop adapting and evolving,” said Joel Wertheim, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of California San Diego. “And seeing how it did that in the past will help us prepare for what it might do in the future.”Studies of the also-rans have shed light on surveillance gaps and policy blunders — providing more evidence that America’s international travel bans were not effective — and on what makes the virus successful, suggesting that in the early phase of the pandemic, transmissibility was more important than immune evasion.The research also highlights how much context matters; variants that make an impact in some places never gain a foothold in others. As a result, predicting which variants will surge to dominance is difficult, and staying on top of future variants and pathogens will require comprehensive, nearly real-time surveillance.“We can gain a lot by looking at the viral genomic sequence and saying, ‘This one is probably worse than another one,’” Dr. Wertheim said. “But the only way to really know is to watch it spread, because there are a whole lot of potentially dangerous variants that never took hold.”Here’s looking at MuThe coronavirus is constantly changing, and most new variants never get noticed or named. But others raise alarms, either because they quickly become more common or because their genomes look ominous.Both were true of Mu as it spread in Colombia. “It contained a couple of mutations that people had been watching very closely,” said Mary Petrone, a genomic epidemiologist at the University of Sydney and an author of the new Mu paper. Several of the mutations in its spike protein had been documented in other immune-evasive variants, including Beta and Gamma.In the new study, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal, scientists compared Mu’s biological characteristics to those of Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma and the original virus. Mu did not replicate faster than any other variant, they found, but it was the most immune-evasive of the bunch — more resistant to antibodies than any known variant besides Omicron, Dr. Fauver said.A Covid-19 patient in an intensive care unit in Bogotá, Colombia, in 2021.Vanessa Jimenez/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy analyzing the genomic sequences of Mu samples collected from all over the world, the researchers reconstructed the variant’s spread. They concluded that Mu had likely emerged in South America in mid-2020. It then circulated for months before it was detected.Genomic surveillance in many parts of South America was “patchy and incomplete,” said Jesse Bloom, an expert in viral evolution at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “If there had been better surveillance in those regions, possibly it would have been easier to make a faster assessment of how worried to be about Mu.”Mu presented another challenge, too. It happened to have a type of mutation, known as a frameshift mutation, that was rare in coronavirus samples. Such mutations were flagged as errors when scientists, including Dr. Fauver, tried to upload their Mu sequences to GISAID, an international repository of viral genomes used to keep tabs on new variants.That complication created delays in the public sharing of Mu sequences. The time that elapsed between when a virus sample was collected from a patient and when it was made publicly available on GISAID was consistently longer for Mu cases than for Delta cases, the researchers found.“The genome itself was basically creating artificial surveillance gaps,” Dr. Fauver said. “It resulted, at least in our experience, in us not getting data out for weeks when normally we’re trying to get it out in days.”(GISAID’s quality-control systems are important, the researchers stressed, and the repository has fixed the issue.)Combine these surveillance gaps with Mu’s immune evasiveness and the variant seemed poised to take off. But that is not what happened. Instead, Mu radiated from South and Central America to other continents but did not circulate widely once it got there, the scientists found. “That was an indication that this variant was not as fit necessarily in maybe the North American and European populations as we had expected,” Dr. Petrone said.That was likely because Mu found itself competing with an even more formidable variant: Delta. Delta was not as skilled at dodging antibodies as Mu, but it was more transmissible. “So, in the end, Delta spread more widely,” Dr. Bloom said.New York City may have been the birthplace of the Iota variant, which was first detected in virus samples collected in November 2020.Shannon Stapleton/ReutersRight variant, right timeStudying successful variants tells only half the story. “Variants that do not become dominant are, in a way, negative controls,” Dr. Petrone said. “They tell us what didn’t work, and, in doing so, help to fill in knowledge gaps around variant fitness.”Delta overtook several immune-evasive variants besides Mu, including Beta, Gamma and Lambda. This pattern suggests that immune evasion alone was not enough to allow a variant to outdo a highly transmissible version of the virus — or at least it wasn’t during the early phase of the pandemic, when few people had immunity.But vaccinations and multiple waves of infection have changed the immune landscape. A highly immune-evasive variant should now have more of an edge, scientists said, which is likely part of the reason Omicron has been so successful.Another recent study suggested that in New York City immune-evasive Gamma tended to do better in neighborhoods with higher levels of pre-existing immunity, in some cases because they were hit hard in the first Covid wave. “We can’t view a new variant in a vacuum, because it comes about in the shadow of all of the variants that came before it,” said Dr. Wertheim, who was an author of the study.Indeed, the clash of variants past reveals that success is highly dependent on context. For example, New York City may have been the birthplace of the Iota variant, which was first detected in virus samples collected in November 2020. “And so it got a foothold early on,” said Dr. Petrone. Even after the more transmissible Alpha variant arrived, Iota remained the city’s dominant variant for months, before eventually fading away.But in Connecticut, where Iota and Alpha both appeared in January 2021, things unfolded differently. “Alpha just kind of took off immediately, and Iota didn’t stand a chance,” said Dr. Petrone, who led a study of the variants in the two regions.Researchers at work in a molecular virology laboratory in Rio de Janeiro.Andre Coelho/EPA, via ShutterstockA similar pattern is already beginning to play out with Omicron’s multiple lineages. In the United States, BA.2.12.1, a subvariant first identified in New York, has taken off, while in South Africa, BA.4 and BA.5 are driving a new surge.That’s another reason to study variants that waned, said Sarah Otto, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia. A variant that was poorly matched for a certain time and place could take off in another. Indeed, Mu’s misfortune might have simply been that it emerged too soon. “There might not have been enough people that had immunity to really give that variant a boost,” Dr. Otto said.But the next variant of concern could be a descendant of, or something similar to, an immune-evasive lineage that never quite took hold, she said.Looking back at previous variants can also provide insight into what worked — or didn’t — in containing them. The new Gamma study, provides further evidence that international travel bans, at least as the United States implemented them, are unlikely to prevent a variant’s global spread.Gamma was first identified in Brazil in late 2020. In May of that year, the United States barred most non-U.S. citizens from traveling into the country from Brazil, a restriction that remained in place until November 2021. Yet Gamma was detected in the United States in January 2021 and soon spread to dozens of states.Because Gamma never came to dominate worldwide, studying its spread provided a “cleaner” picture of the effectiveness of travel bans, said Tetyana Vasylyeva, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of California San Diego and an author of the study. “When it comes to studying variants like, let’s say, Delta — something that has caused a major outbreak in every place — it is really difficult at times to find patterns, because it happens on a very large scale and very fast,” she said.In an ongoing global health emergency, with a virus that changes fast, there is an understandable impulse to focus on the future, Dr. Fauver said. And as the world’s attention turned to Delta and then Omicron, he and his colleagues discussed whether to continue their study of old-news Mu.“We were like, ‘Does anyone care about Mu anymore?’” Dr. Fauver recalled. “But we think there’s still room for high-quality studies that ask questions about previous variants of concern and try to look back on what happened.”

McMaster University researchers who study the dynamics of infectious disease transmission have investigated the population-level consequences of a potentially significant — and unobvious — benefit of wearing masks.
For the study, the researchers developed a model to investigate COVID-19 “variolation” — an incidental but potentially beneficial form of immunization achieved by inhaling smaller doses of the virus than would be inhaled without a mask.
A form of variolation was deliberately used in the 18th century to control smallpox. It involved infecting a healthy individual with small doses of the live virus taken from a dried scab or pustule of a person infected with smallpox. Variolated individuals often experienced far less severe disease than those who were infected naturally, but nevertheless were immune to further infection.
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, it was suggested that people who were infected while masked might experience mild illness and could be considered “variolated.”
The new mathematical model allows researchers to estimate the potential impact of this effect on the population as a whole.
“If the variolation effect is strong, then the number of severe cases, and consequently pressure on health-care systems, could be substantially reduced if most people wear masks — even if masks don’t prevent them from being infected,” says senior author David Earn, Faculty of Science Research Chair in Mathematical Epidemiology and Professor of Mathematics at McMaster and Canada’s Global Nexus for Pandemics & Biological Threats.
The model suggests effective masking could drastically slow the spread of COVID-19, reduce the magnitude of the pandemic peak by “flattening the curve,” and reduce the prevalence of severe cases from that point forward.
“Our qualitative findings are that the value of masking is under-appreciated in a public health context, especially as COVID-19 transitions from pandemic to endemic, and we should think twice about getting rid of mask mandates,” says Zachary Levine, lead author of the study and a former undergraduate in the Arts and Science programme at McMaster. Levine is now a graduate student at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
“As we prepare for the next pandemic, understanding how different infection control strategies could affect disease dynamics could help us understand which policies are worth pursuing,” he says.
The results of this research are potentially applicable to any respiratory infection that is transmitted by inhaling infectious particles. For future COVID variants or other infectious diseases, the model can be used to study how increasing the proportion of mild cases affects the overall dynamics of disease spread.
“If wearing a mask protects you in addition to those in the room around you, it could also have significant impacts for everyone who may not be in the room,” says Levine.
The study was published online in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
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Materials provided by McMaster University. Original written by Michelle Donovan. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

University of South Australia scientists have uncovered another reason why society should be paying more attention to mental health: it is closely aligned to blood pressure and heart rate variations.
A new study published in BioMedical Engineering draws a link between mental illness and widely fluctuating blood pressure, which can lead to cardiovascular disease and organ damage.
UniSA researcher Dr Renly Lim and colleagues from Malaysian universities say there is clear evidence that mental illness interferes with the body’s autonomic functions, including blood pressure, heart rate, temperature and breathing.
“We reviewed 12 studies on people with anxiety, depression and panic disorders and found that, regardless of age, mental illness is significantly associated with greater blood pressure variations during the day,” Dr Lim says.
“We also found that for people who are mentally ill, their heart rate does not adapt to external stressors as it should.
“Contrary to what many people think, a healthy heart is not one that beats like a metronome. Instead, it should adjust to withstand environmental and psychological challenges. A constantly changing heart rate is actually a sign of good health.”
Reduced heart rate variation (HRV) is common in people with mental illness and indicates that the body’s stress response is poor, exacerbating the negative effects of chronic stress.

New research from the University of California, Irvine, finds that drug withdrawal-induced anxiety and reinstatement of drug seeking behaviors are controlled by a single pathway in the brain and centered around dopamine cells.
The study, “An extended amygdala-midbrain circuit controlling cocaine withdrawal-induced anxiety and reinstatement,” was published today in Cell Reports.
Addiction occurs in phases: initial drug exposures are rewarding, repeated administration leads to tolerance or sensitization to the drug’s effects, and withdrawal leads to anxiety and a negative affective state, which, in turn, contribute to reinstatement of drug taking/seeking.
“In order to prevent relapse among drug users, specifically cocaine users, we need to understand the factors in the brain that contribute to drug seeking behaviors and the vulnerability to relapse,” said Kevin Beier, PhD, assistant professor of physiology and biophysics at UCI School of Medicine. “In this study, we identified a brain circuit that is responsible for drug withdrawal-induced anxiety as well as relapse-related behavior, along with the identification of a potential target for therapeutic interventions.”
The negative affective state induced by withdrawal from use of drugs of abuse is a critical factor causing drug users to relapse.
“Both the drug withdrawal-induced anxiety and reinstatement of drug seeking are controlled by a single pathway centered around dopamine cells in the ventral midbrain,” explained Beier. “That a single pathway controls both sets of behavioral changes may help to explain many addiction-related behavioral phenomena. Importantly, it links them both directly to dopamine, which is more typically linked to reward-related behaviors.”
Although midbrain dopamine circuits are central to motivated behaviors, the knowledge of how experience modifies these circuits to facilitate subsequent behavioral adaptations is limited. This study demonstrates the selective role of a ventral tegmental area dopamine projection to the amygdala for cocaine induced anxiety, but not cocaine reward or sensitization. Silencing this projection prevents development of anxiety during protracted withdrawal after cocaine use.
According to the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, there are roughly 70,000 drug overdoses each year in the United States. In 2017, nearly one in five drug overdose deaths was cocaine-related, with the highest rate of cocaine-related overdoses and deaths occurring among non-Hispanic black populations. Between 2012 and 2018, the rate of cocaine-related overdose deaths increased from 1.4 to 4.5 percent. The American Addiction Centers state recent drug relapse statistics show that more than 85 percent of individuals relapse and return to drug use within a year following treatment.
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program, American Parkinson Disease Association, Alzheimer’s Association, New Vision Research, and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.
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Materials provided by University of California – Irvine. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

For some people with alcohol use disorder, it might be the sight of a familiar bar or a favorite bottle; for others, it might be the feeling of leaving the office after a stressful day at work or stepping into a crowded party. Most people who struggle with drug or alcohol addiction have particular cues that set off their cravings.
Now, scientists at Scripps Research have discovered how, in rats dependent on alcohol, environmental cues that become associated with drinking during withdrawal are much more powerful than those learned during the early phases of alcohol use, leading to more irresistible cravings. The new findings, published online in the British Journal of Pharmacology, could eventually lead to new treatments to minimize cravings in people with addictions.
“We already knew that the craving produced by environmental stimuli typically intensifies over time in severe alcohol use disorder,” says Friedbert Weiss, PhD, a professor at Scripps Research, “but no one had teased apart, at both a behavioral and neurobiological level, why that is until now.”
An estimated 14.5 million people in the United States have alcohol use disorder, which encompasses a range of unhealthy drinking behaviors. Like other drug addictions, alcohol addiction is characterized by cycles of withdrawal, abstinence and relapse. Cravings set off by environmental stimuli — like those present when driving past a local bar — are powerful drivers for relapse. Similarly, rats that have learned to associate a particular smell with alcohol will seek out alcohol when exposed to the smell.
In the new work, Weiss and his colleagues sought to understand whether the experience of repeatedly drinking alcohol during withdrawal — rather than just the length of time or severity of the addiction — helps strengthen the learned associations that lead to cravings. They conditioned rats that were not dependent on alcohol to associate an anise or orange scent with alcohol. Then, a subset of those animals went through cycles of withdrawal, during which they were conditioned to associate a different scent with alcohol consumption.
“This allowed us to separate, for the first time, the learning that happens during the original, non-dependent state, and the learning that happens during withdrawal,” says Weiss.

Scientists at Scripps Research have unveiled a new software tool for studying RNA (ribonucleic acid) molecules, which have a host of critical roles in organisms. The open-source app, “Pytheas,” described May 3, 2022, in Nature Communications, speeds up the process of characterizing and quantifying RNAs in basic research and drug-development settings.
The app is designed specifically to analyze RNA data generated through a method called mass spectrometry. “Mass spec” is commonly used to evaluate RNA molecules that are not simple chains of standard RNA nucleotides but are instead modified in some way. Among their demonstrations, the researchers showed that Pytheas can be used to swiftly identify and quantify modified RNA molecules like those in the current Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
“The analysis of RNA data from mass spectrometry has been a relatively laborious process, lacking the tools found in other areas of biological research, and so our aim with Pytheas is to bring the field into the 21st century,” says study senior author James Williamson, PhD, professor in the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology, and vice president of Research and Academic Affairs at Scripps Research.
The first authors of the study were Luigi D’Ascenzo, PhD, and Anna Popova, PhD, respectively a postdoctoral research associate and staff scientist in the Williamson lab during the study.
RNA is chemically very similar to DNA, and RNA molecules in cells are heavily involved in the process of translating genes into proteins, as well as in fine-tuning gene activity. Additionally, RNA-based therapeutics — which include the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines — are viewed as a highly promising new class of medicines, capable in principle of hitting their biological targets more potently and selectively than traditional small-molecule drugs.
A common tool for detecting RNA molecules that have chemical modifications is mass spectrometry, which can be used essentially to recognize the RNAs and their modifications based on their masses. Natural RNAs often have modifications that affect their functions, while RNAs used for vaccines and RNA-based drugs are almost always modified artificially to optimize their activity and reduce side effects. Up to now, methods for processing raw mass spectrometry data on modified RNAs have been relatively slow and manual — thus, very labor-intensive — in contrast to corresponding methods in the field of protein analysis, for example.

Published in Clinical Nutrition, researchers from the University of Minnesota Medical School looked at colonic hydrogen sulfide — a toxic gas in the body that smells like rotten eggs — production in people in response to animal- and plant-based diet interventions.
“Although the role of hydrogen sulfide has long been a subject of great interest in the pathogenesis of multiple important diseases — such as ulcerative colitis, colon cancer, and obesity — past investigations have not been able to link dietary data, microbiome characterization and actual hydrogen sulfide production,” said Alexander Khoruts, MD, a gastroenterologist in the U of M Medical School and M Health Fairview. “This is what we have done here.”
From a human cohort, the study supports the general hypothesis that hydrogen sulfide produced by the gut microbiota increases with an animal-based diet. However, the results also suggested the existence of gut microbiome enterotypes that respond differentially and even paradoxically to different dietary input.
The study found that: In the majority of participants, a plant-based diet resulted in a lower hydrogen sulfide production compared to an animal-based (i.e., western) diet. As expected, a plant-based diet contained more fiber, while an animal-based diet contained more protein. In some individuals, plant-based diets did not lower hydrogen sulfide production and even led to some increases in it. Preliminary results suggested the existence of different compositions of gut microbiota (enterotypes) that correlate with differential responsiveness to diet in terms of hydrogen sulfide production.”The study was consistent with the general understanding that regular intake of fiber-containing foods is beneficial to gut health,” said Dr. Levi Teigen, a nutrition researcher in the Division of Gastroenterology in the U of M Medical School. “Future analyses of the gut microbiome may help to individualize nutrition interventions.”
The study was funded by Healthy Foods Healthy Lives, Achieving Cures Together, the Allen Foundation and the University of Minnesota MnDRIVE Initiative. The research team envisions future work that will lead to more personalized nutritional counseling that will be informed by microbiome-based diagnostics.
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Materials provided by University of Minnesota Medical School. Original written by Kat Dodge. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Children whose parents cannot afford diapers do not get quality sleep, according to a study by the Rutgers School of Nursing.
The study, published in the Journal of Developmental Behavioral Pediatrics, is the first to examine the relationship between diaper need and sleep.
“Sleep promotes brain development and solidifies learning and memory,” said co-author Sallie Porter, an associate professor at Rutgers School of Nursing. “Children with compromised sleep are more at risk for childhood obesity and emotional and behavioral problems.”
The researchers surveyed 129 parents of children age 3 and younger who were involved in early development, home visiting and disability support programs on the severity of their diaper need and their child’s sleep habits. The habits include the time it takes for them to fall asleep, how often they wake at night, the longest stretch they sleep and the total number of minutes they sleep. Parents were asked to report difficulties with bedtime routines, sleep problems and sleep locations and their perceptions of their child’s quality of sleep. They were also asked if their child had been diagnosed with a developmental disability.
They found that 88 percent of the participating families were food insecure and 76 percent were without diapers at least once a year, with more than one-third reporting not having diapers monthly. One-third of the children had a diagnosed developmental disability and 47 percent of the parents had concerns about their child’s development.
They found that children in families that struggled to provide diapers were more likely to have disrupted, shorter sleep periods and lower total sleep scores. Parents who worried about not having enough diapers at least monthly more likely to report their baby’s sleep as a problem or difficult.
“Approximately one-third of U.S. mothers report difficulty affording diapers,and prevalence during the COVID-19 pandemic is likely much higher,” said Porter. “Diaper need is associated with an increased incidence of irritated skin and urinary tract infections. It is also related to increased maternal mental health symptoms.”
Porter says the findings suggest that clinicians should ask about diaper need during well-child visits and then connect families to resources that provide diapering supplies. They should also provide guidance on appropriate sleep practices, including consistent calming bedtime routines.
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Materials provided by Rutgers University. Original written by Patti Verbanas. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.